NEIGHBORS
•The
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS
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IJTTI.r, LonSA S KIXCKRS WKIJK \IMHl>i:i! THAN' HKI! MOTIIEK S.
SHK WAS OXLY EIGHT, HIT SIIF. SOON' LEARNED I'O TIE A
PUME."
NEIGHBORS
LIFE STORIES OF THE OTHER HALF
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OP
" HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES," " THE MAKING OF
AN AMERICAN," "CHILDREN OF THE TENE-
MENTS," " HERO TALES OF THE
FAR NORTH," ETC.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1914
All rights reserved
COPTEIGHT, 1914,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. Reprinted
December, 1914.
Norfaaoolj JPress
J. 8. CuBhing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
SRLF
YRL
PREFACE
These stories have come to me from
many sources — some from my own expe-
rience, others from settlement workers,
still others from the records of organized
charity, that are never dry, as some think,
but alive with vital human interest and
with the faithful striving to help the
brother so that it counts. They have
this in common, that they are true. For
good reasons, names and places are
changed, but they all happened as told
here. I could not have invented them
had I tried; I should not have tried if I
could. For it is as pictures from the life
vi PREFACE
in which they and we, you and I, are
partners, that I wish them to make their
appeal to the neighbor who Hves but
around the corner and does not know it.
JACOB A. RIIS.
CONTENTS
PAOK
The Answer of Ludlow Street . . 1
Kin 11
The Wars of the Rileys . . . .16
Life's Best Gift 31
Driven from Home 42
The Problem of the Widow Salvini . 48
Peter 63
Kate's Choice 70
The Mother's Heaven .... 82
Where he Found his Neighbor . . 86
What the Snowflake Told . . . 101
The City's Heart 108
Chips from the Maelstrom . . .122
Heartsease 139
His Christmas Gift 147
Our Roof Garden among the Tenements 157
The Snow Babies' Christmas . . .168
As Told by the Rabbi . . . .198
The Strand from Above .... 205
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
" Little Louisa's fingers were nimbler than her
mother's. She was only eight, but she
soon learned to tie a plume " . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
"He tied his feet together with the prayer
shawl, and looked once upon the rising
sun" 9
" There he stood, indiflferent, bored if anything,
shiftless " 64
" If Kate sees it, she steals up behind her, and,
putting two affectionate arms around her
neck, whispers in her ear, ' I love oo.
Grannie'" 80
" When we had set up a Christmas tree to-
gether, to the wild delight of the children " 95
" Please, your Honor, let this man go ! It is
Christmas" 153
iz
NEIGHBORS
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET
"You get the money, or out you go !
I ain't in the business for me health," and
the bang of the door and the angry clatter
of the landlord's boots on the stairs, as
he went down, bore witness that he meant
what he said.
Judah Kapelowitz and his wife sat and
looked silently at the little dark room when
the last note of his voice had died away
in the hall. They knew it well enough —
it was their last day of grace. They were
two months behind with the rent, and
where it was to come from neither of them
knew. Six years of struggling in the
2 NEIGHBORS
Promised Land, and this was what it
had brought them.
A hungry little cry roused the woman
from her apathy. She went over and took
the baby and put it mechanically to her
poor breast. Holding it so, she sat by the
window and looked out upon the gray
November day. Her husband had not
stirred. Each avoided the question in the
other's eyes, for neither had an answer.
They were young people as men reckon
age in happy days, Judah scarce past
thirty; but it is not always the years
that count in Ludlow Street. Behind
that and the tenement stretched the end-
less days of suffering in their Galician
home, where the Jew was hated and
despised as the one thrifty trader of
the country, tortured alike by drunken
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET 3
peasant and cruel noble when they were
not plotting murder against one another.
With all their little savings they had paid
Judah's passage to the land where men
were free to labor, free to worship as their
fathers did — a twice-blessed country,
surely — and he had gone, leaving Sarah,
his wife, and their child to wait for word
that Judah was rich and expected them.
The wealth he found in Ludlow Street
was all piled on his push-cart, and his perse-
cutors would have scorned it. A handful
of carrots, a few cabbages and beets, is
not much to plan transatlantic voyages
on; but what with Sarah's eager letters
and Judah's starving himself daily to save
every penny, he managed in two long
years to scrape together the money for
the steamship ticket that set all the
4 NEIGHBORS
tongues wagging in his home village when
it came : Judah Kapelowitz had made his
fortune in the far land, it was plain to be
seen. Sarah and the boy, now grown big
enough to speak his father's name with
an altogether cunning little catch, bade a
joyous good-by to their friends and set
their faces hopefully toward the West.
Once they were together, all their troubles
would be at an end.
In the poor tenement the peddler lay
awake till far into the night, hearkening
to the noises of the street. He had
gone hungry to bed, and he was too
tired to sleep. Over and over he counted
the many miles of stormy ocean and the
days to their coming, Sarah and the lit-
tle Judah. Once they were together, he
would work, work, work — and should
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET 5
they not make a living in the great,
wealthy city ?
With the dawn lighting up the eastern
sky he slept the sleep of exhaustion, his
question unanswered.
That was six years ago — six hard, weary
years. They had worked together, he at
his push-cart, Sarah for the sweater, earn-
ing a few cents finishing *' pants" when she
could. Little Judah did his share, pulling
thread, until his sister came and he had to
mind her. Together they had kept a roof
overhead, and less and less to eat, till Judah
had to give up his cart. Between the
fierce competition and the police black-
mail it would no longer keep body and
soul together for its owner. A painter
in the next house was in need of a
hand, and Judah apprenticed himself to
6 NEIGHBORS
him for a dollar a day. If he could hold
out a year or two, he might earn journey-
man's wages and have steady work. The
boss saw that he had an eye for the busi-
ness. But, though Judah's eye was good,
he lacked the "strong stomach" which is
even more important to a painter. He
had starved so long that the smell of the
paint made him sick and he could not work
fast enough. So the boss discharged him.
"The sheeny was no good," was all the
character he gave him.
It was then the twins came. There
was not a penny in the house, and the rent
money was long in arrears. Judah went
out and asked for work. He sought no
alms; he begged merely for a chance to
earn a living at any price, any wages.
Nobody wanted him, as was right and
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET 7
proper, no doubt. To underbid the living
wage is even a worse sin against society
than to *' debase its standard of living," we
are told by those who should know. Judah
Kapelowitz was only an ignorant Jew, plead-
ing for work that he might earn bread for
his starving babies. He knew nothing of
standards, but he would have sold his soul
for a loaf of bread that day. He found
no one to pay the price, and he came home
hungry as he had gone out. In the after-
noon the landlord called for the rent.
Another tiny wail came from the old
baby carriage in which the twins slept,
and the mother turned her head from the
twilight street where the lights were begin-
ning to come out. Judah rose heavily
from his seat.
'*I go get money," he said, slowly.
8 NEIGHBORS
"I work for Mr. Springer two days. He
will give me money." And he went out.
Mr. Springer was the boss painter. He
did not give Judah his wages. He had not
earned them, he said, and showed him the
door. The man pleaded hotly, despair-
ingly. They were hungry, the little kids
and his wife. Only fifty cents of the two
dollars — fifty cents ! The painter put him
out, and when he would not go, kicked him.
"Look out for that Jew, John," he said,
putting up the shutters. "We shall have
him setting off a bomb on us next. They
turn Anarchist when they get desperate."
Mr. Springer was, it will be perceived, a
man of discernment.
Judah Kapelowitz lay down beside his
wife at night without a word of complaint.
"To-morrow," he said, "I do it."
^I- ^o:fl
HE TIED HIS FEET TOGETHER WITH THE PRAYER SHAWL, AND
LOOKED ONCE UPON THE RISING SUN,"
THE ANSWER OF LUDLOW STREET 9
He arose early and washed himself with
care. He bound the praying-band upon
his forehead, and upon his wrist the tefillin
with the Holy Name; then he covered his
head with the tallith and prayed to the
God of his fathers who brought them out
of bondage, and blessed his house and his
children, little Judah and Miriam his sister,
and the twins in the cradle. As he kissed
his wife good-by, he said that he had found
work and wages, and would bring back
money. She saw him go down in his work-
ing clothes ; she did not know that he had
hidden the tallith under his apron.
He did not leave the house, but, when
the door was closed, went up to the roof.
Standing upon the edge of it, he tied
his feet together with the prayer shawl,
looked once upon the rising sun, and
10 NEIGHBORS
threw himself into the street, seventy feet
below.
"It is Judah Kapelowitz, the painter,"
said the awed neighbors, who ran up and
looked in his dead face. The police came
and took him to the station-house, for
Judah, who living had kept the law of
God and man, had broken both in his dying.
They laid the body on the floor in front of
the prison cells and covered it with the
tallith as with a shroud. Sarah, his wife,
sat by, white and tearless, with the twins
at her breast. Little Miriam hid her
head in her lap, frightened at the silence
about them. At the tenement around the
corner men were carrying her poor belong-
ings out and stacking them in the street.
They were homeless and fatherless.
Ludlow Street had given its answer.
KIN
Early twilight was setting in on the
Holy Eve. In the streets of the city
stirred the bustling preparation for the
holiday. The great stores were lighting
up, and crowds of shoppers thronged the
sidewalks and stood stamping their feet in
the snow at the crossings where endless
streams of carriages passed. At a corner
where two such currents met sat an old
man, propped against a pillar of the ele-
vated road, and played on a squeaky fiddle.
His thin hair was white as the snow that
fell in great soft flakes on his worn coat,
buttoned tight to keep him warm; his
face was pinched by want and his back was
11
12 NEIGHBORS
bent. The tune he played was cracked
and old like himself, and it stirred no
response in the passing crowd. The tin
cup in his lap held only a few coppers.
There was a jam of vehicles on the avenue
and the crush increased. Among the new-
comers was a tall young woman in a fur
coat, who stood quietly musing while she
waited, till a quavering note from the old
man's violin found its way into her reveries.
She turned inquiringly toward him and
took in the forlorn figure, the empty cup,
and the indifferent throng with a glance.
A light kindled in her eyes and a half-
amused smile played upon her lips ; she
stepped close to the fiddler, touched his
shoulder lightly, and, with a gesture of
gentle assurance, took the violin from his
hands. She drew the bow across the strings
KIN 13
once or twice, tightened them, and pon-
dered a moment.
Presently there floated out upon the
evening the famihar strains of "Old Black
Joe" played by the hand of a master. It
rose above the noise of the street ; through
the rattle and roar of a train passing over-
head, through the calls of cabmen and
hucksters, it made its way, and where it
went a silence fell. It was as if every ear
was bent to listen. The crossing was clear,
but not a foot stirred at the sound of the
policeman's whistle. As the last strain of
the tune died away, and was succeeded by
the appealing notes of "'Way Down upon
the Suwanee River," every eye was turned
upon the young player. She stood erect,
with heightened color, and nodded brightly
toward the old man. Silver coins began to
14 NEIGHBORS
drop in his cup. Twice she played the tune
to the end. At the repetition of the refrain,
•' Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary,
Far from the old folks at home,"
a man in a wide-brimmed hat who had been
listening intently emptied his pockets into
the old man's lap and disappeared in the
crowd.
TraflSc on street and avenue had ceased ;
not a wheel turned. From street cars and
cabs heads were poked to find out the cause
of the strange hold-up. The policeman
stood spellbound, the whistle in his half-
raised hand. In the hush that had fallen
upon the world rose clear and sweet the
hymn, **It came upon a midnight clear,"
and here and there hats came off in the
crowd. Once more the young woman in-
KIN 15
clined her head toward the old fiddler,
and coins and banknotes were poured into
his cup and into his lap until they could
hold no more. Her eyes were wet with
laughing tears as she saw it. When she
had played the verse out, she put the violin
back into its owner's hands and with a low
"Merry Christmas, friend !" was gone.
The policeman awoke and blew his
whistle with a sudden blast, street cars
and cabs started up, business resumed its
sway, the throng passed on, leaving the old
man with his hoard as he gazed with unbe-
lieving eyes upon it. The world moved
once more, roused from its brief dream.
But the dream had left it something that
was wanting before, something better than
the old man had found. Its heart had
been touched.
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS
It was the night before Washington's
Birthday that Mr. Riley broke loose.
They will speak of it long in the Windy
City as "the night of the big storm," and
with good right — it was "that suddint
and fierce," just like Mr. Riley himself in
his berserker moods. Mr. Riley was one
of the enlivening problems of "the Bureau"
in the region back of the stock-yards that
kept it from being dulled by the routine of
looking after the poor. He was more : he
rose to the dignity of a "cause" at uncertain
intervals when the cost of living, underpay
and overtime, sickness and death, over-
population, and all the other well-worn
16
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 17
props of poverty retired to the wings and
left the stage to Mr. Riley rampant, suffi-
cient for the time and as informing as a
whole course at the School of Philanthropy.
In between, Mr. Riley was a capable meat-
cutter earning good wages, who wouldn't
have done a neighbor out of a cent that was
his due, a robust citizen with more than his
share of good looks, a devoted husband
and a doting father, inseparable when at
home from little Mike, whose baby trick of
squaring off and offering to "bust his
father's face" was the pride of the block.
"Win yez look at de kid .^ Ain't he a
foine one ? " shouted Mr. Riley, with peals
of laughter; and the men smoking their
pipes at the fence set the youngster on with
admiring taunts. Mike was just turned
three. His great stunt, when his father
18 NEIGHBORS
was not at hand, was to fall off everything
in sight. Daily alarms brought from the
relief party of hurrying mothers the un-
varying cry, "Who's got hurted ? Is it
Mike?" But only Mike's feelings were
hurt. Doleful howls, as he hove in sight,
convoyed and comforted by Kate, aged
seven, gave abundant proof that in wind
and limb he was all that could be desired.
This was Mr. Riley in his hours of ease
and domesticity. Mr. Riley rampant was
a very different person. His arrival was
invariably heralded by the smashing of the
top of the kitchen stove, follo'wed by the
summary ejection of the once beloved
family, helter-skelter, from the tenement.
Three times the Bureau had been at the
expense of having the stove top mended to
keep the little Rileys from starving and
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 19
freezing at once, and it was looking forward
with concern to the meat-cutter's next
encounter with his grievance. For there
was a psychological reason for the manner
of his outbreaks. The Riley s had once
had a boarder, when Kate was a baby.
He happened to be Mrs. Riley's brother,
and he left, presuming on the kinship,
without paying his board. As long as the
meat-cutter was sober he remembered only
the pleasant comradeship with his brother-
in-law, and extended the hospitality of a
neighborly fireside to his wife's relations.
But no sooner had he taken a drink or two
than the old grievance loomed large, and
grew, as he went on, into a capital injury, to
be avenged upon all and everything that in
any way recalled the monstrous wrong of his
life. That the cooking-stove should come
20 NEIGHBORS
first was natural, from his point of view.
Upon it had been prepared the felonious
meals, by it he had smoked the pipe of peace
with the false friend. The crash in the
kitchen had become the unvarying signal
for the hasty exit of the rest of the family
and the organizing of Kate into a scouting
party to keep Mrs. Riley and the Bureau
informed about the progress of events in the
house where the meat-cutter raged alone.
Mrs. Riley was a loyal, if not always a
patient, woman — who can blame her ? —
and accepted the situation as part of the
marital compact, clearly comprehended,
perhaps foreshadowed, in her vow to cling
to her husband "for better for worse,"
and therefore not to be questioned. In
times of peace she remembered not the
days of storm and stress. Once indeed.
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 21
when her best gingham had been sacrificed
to the furies of war, she had considered
whether the indefinite multipHcation of
the tribe of Riley were in the long run desir-
able, and had put it to the young woman
from the Bureau, who was superintending
the repair of the stove top, this way : " I
am thinking, Miss Kane, if I will live
with Mr. Riley any longer ; would you ? "
— to the blushing confusion of that repre-
sentative of the social order. However,
that crisis passed. Mr. Riley took the
pledge for the fourth or fifth time, and the
next day appeared at the oflBce, volunteer-
ing to assign himself and his earnings to
the Bureau for the benefit of his wife and
his creditors, reserving only enough for
luncheons and tobacco, but nothing for
drinks. The Bureau took an hour off to
22 NEIGHBORS
recover from the shock. If it had mis-
givings, it refused to listen to them. The
world had turned a corner in the city by
the lake and was on the home-stretch : Mr.
Riley had reformed.
And, in truth, so it seemed. For once he
was as good as his word. Christmas passed,
and the manifold temptations of New Year,
with Mike and his father still chums. Kate
was improving the chance to profit by the
school-learning so fatally interrupted in
other days. Seventeen weeks went by with
Mr. Riley's wages paid in at the Bureau
every Saturday ; the grocer smiled a fat
welcome to the Riley children, the clock
man and the spring man and the other
installment collectors had ceased to be
importunate. Mrs. Riley was having bliss-
ful visions of a new spring hat. Life back
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 23
of the stock-yards was in a way of becom-
ing ordinary and slow, when the fatal
twenty-second of February hove in sight.
The night before, Mr. Riley, quitting
work, met a friend at the gate, who, pity-
ing his penniless state, informed him that
"there was the price of a drink at the cor-
ner" for him, meaning at Quinlan's saloon.
Now this was prodding the meat-cutter in
a tender spot. He hated waste as much as
his employers, who proverbially exploited
all of the pig but the squeal. He didn't
want the drink, but to have it waiting
there with no one to come for it was wicked
waste. It was his clear duty to save it,
and he did. Among those drinking at the
bar were some of his fellow- workmen, who
stood treat. That called for a return,
and Riley's credit was good. It was late
24 NEIGHBORS
before the party broke up ; it was 3 a.m.
when the meat-cutter burst into the tene-
ment, roaring drunk, clamoring for the
lives of brothers-in-law in general and that
of his own in particular, and smashed the
stove lids with crash after crash that aroused
the slumbering household with a jerk.
For once it was caught napping. The
long peace had bred a fatal sense of security.
Kate was off scouting duty and Mrs. Riley
had her hands full with Pat, Bridget, and
the baby all having measles at once — too
full to take warning from her husband's
suspicious absence at bedtime. Roused
in the middle of the night to the defense of
her brood, she fought gallantly, but without
hope. The battle was bloody and brief.
Beaten and bruised, she gathered up her
young and fled into the blinding storm to
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 25
the house of a pitying neighbor, who took
them in, measles and all, to snuggle up with
his own while he mounted guard on the
doorstep against any pursuing enemy. But
the meat-cutter merely slammed the door
upon his evicted family. He spent the
rest of the night smashing the reminders
of his brother-in-law's hated kin. Kate,
reconnoitering at daybreak, brought back
word that he was raging around the house
with three other drunken men. The open-
ing of the Bureau found her encamped on
the doorstep with a demand that help come
quickly — the worst had happened. "Has
little Mike broken his neck ? " they asked
in breathless chorus. "Worse nor that,"
she panted; "do be comin', Miss Kane !"
"Oh, what is it ? Are any of the children
dead.?"
26 NEIGHBORS
"Worse nor that; Mr. Riley has broke
loose !'* Kate always spoke of her father
in his tantrums as Mister, as if he were a
doubtful acquaintance. Her story of the
night's doings was so lurid that the in-
timacy of many a post-bellum remorse felt
unequal to the strain, and Miss Kane com-
mandeered a policeman on the way to the
house. The meat-cutter received her with
elaborate inebriate courtesy, loftily ignor-
ing the officer.
"Who is he ?" he asked, aside.
She tried evasion. "A friend of mine I
met." She was sorry immediately.
"Is he that? Then he is no friend of
mine. Oh, Miss Kane," he grieved, "why
did you go for to get him ? You know I'd
have protected you !" This with an indig-
nant scowl at his fellow-marauders, who
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 27
were furtively edging toward the door.
An inquest of the house showed the devasta-
tion of war. The kitchen was a wreck;
the bedroom furniture smashed ; the Morris
chair in which the family of young Rileys
had reveled in the measles lay in splinters.
"It was so hot here last night," suggested
the meat-cutter, gravely, "it must have fell
to pieces." In the course of the inspection
Mrs. Riley appeared, keeping close to the
policeman, wrathful and fearful at once,
with a wondrous black eye. Her husband
regarded it with expert interest and ven-
tured the reflection that it was a shame,
and she the fine-looking woman that she
was ! At that Mrs. Riley edged away
toward her husband and eyed the bluecoat
with hostile looks.
Between crying and laughing, "the
28 NEIGHBORS
Bureau lady" dismissed the policeman and
officiated at the reunion of the family on
condition that the meat-cutter appear at
the office and get the dressing down which
he so richly deserved, which he did. But
his dignity had been offended by the brass
buttons, and he insisted upon its being
administered by one of his own sex.
"I like her," he explained, indicating
Miss Kane with reproving forefinger, *'but
she's gone back on me." Another grievance
had been added to that of the unpaid board.
The peace that was made lasted just ten
days, when Mr. Riley broke loose once
more, and this time he was brought into
court. The whole Bureau went along to
tell the story of the compact and the manner
of its breaking. Mr. Riley listened atten-
tively to the recital of the black record.
THE WARS OF THE RILEYS 29
"What have you to say to this ?" scowled
the Judge. The prisoner nodded.
"It is all true what the lady says, your
Honor; she put it fair."
"I have a good mind to send you to
Bridewell to break stone.'*
"Don't do that, Judge, and lose me job.
I want to be wid me family." Mrs. Riley
looked imploringly at the bench. His
Honor's glance took in her face with the
family group.
"Looks like it," he mused; but in the
end he agreed to hand him over to the
Bureau for one more trial, first administer-
ing the pledge in open court. Mr. Riley
took the oath with great solemnity and
entire good faith, kissed the Bible with a
smack, reached up a large red fist for the
Judge to shake, and the clerk. Then he
30 NEIGHBORS
pledged lasting friendship to the whole
Bureau, including Miss Kane, whom he
generously forgave the wrong she had done
him, presented little Mike to the Court as
"de foinest kid in de ward," took the
gurgling baby from Mrs. Riley and gallantly
gave her his arm. Leaning fondly upon
it, a little lame and sore yet from the fight
and with one eye in deep mourning, she
turned a proudly hopeful look upon her
husband, like a rainbow spanning a black
departing cloud. And thus, with fleet-
footed Kate in the van proclaiming the
peace, and three prattling children clinging
to their hands and clothes, they passed
out into life to begin it anew. And bench
and Bureau, with sudden emotion, hope-
lessly irrational and altogether hopeful
and good, cheered them on their way.
LIFE'S BEST GIFT
Margaret Kelly is dead, and I need
not scruple to call her by her own name.
For it is certain that she left no kin to
mourn her. She did all the mourning her-
self in her lifetime, and better than that
when there was need. She nursed her
impetuous Irish father and her gentle
English mother in their old age — like the
loving daughter she was — and, last of all,
her only sister. When she had laid them
away, side by side, she turned to face the
world alone, undaunted, with all the fight-
ing grit of her people from both sides of the
Channel. If troubles came upon her for
which she was no match, it can be truly
31
32 NEIGHBORS
said that she went down fighting. And
who of her blood would ask for more ?
What I have set down here is almost as
much as any one ever heard about her
people. She was an old woman when she
came in a way of figuring in these pages,
and all that lay behind her.
Of her own past this much was known :
that she had once been an exceedingly
prosperous designer of dresses, with a
brown-stone house on Lexington Avenue,
and some of the city's wealthiest women
for her customers. Carriages with liveried
footmen were not rarely seen at her door,
and a small army of seamstresses worked
out her plans. Her sister was her book-
keeper and the business head of the house.
Fair as it seemed, it proved a house of cards,
and with the sister's death it fell. One loss
LIFE'S BEST GIFT 3S
followed another. Margaret Kelly knew
nothing of money or the ways of business.
She lost the house, and with it her fine
clients. For a while she made her stand in
a flat with the most faithful of her sewing-
women to help her. But that also had to
go when more money went out than came
in and nothing was left for the landlord.
Younger rivals crowded her out. She was
stamped "old-fashioned," and that was
the end of it. Her last friend left her.
Worry and perplexity made her ill, and
while she was helpless in Bellevue Hospital,
being in a ward with no "next friend" on
the books, they sent her over to the Island
with the paupers. Against this indignity
her proud spirit arose and made the body
forget its ills. She dragged herself down
to the boat that took her back to the city.
34 NEIGHBORS
only to find that her last few belongings
were gone, the little hall room she had
occupied in a house in Twenty -ninth Street
locked against her, and she, at seventy-
five, on the street, penniless, and without
one who cared for her in all the world.
Yes, there was one. A dressmaker who
had known her in happier days saw from her
window opposite Father McGlynn's church
a white-haired woman seek shelter within
the big storm-doors night after night in the
bitter cold of midwinter, and recognized in
her the once proud and prosperous Miss
Kelly. Shocked and grieved, she went
to the district office of the Charities with
money to pay for shelter and begged them
to take the old lady in charge and save her
from want.
And what a splendid old lady she was !
LIFE'S BEST GIFT 35
Famished with the hunger of weeks and
months, but with pride undaunted, straight
as an arrow under the burden of heavy
years, she met the visitor with all the
dignity of a queen. The deep lines of
suffering in her face grew deeper as she
heard her message. She drew the poor
black alpaca about her with a gesture as if
she were warding off a blow: "Why," she
asked, "should any one intrude upon her
to offer aid ? She had not asked for any-
thing, and was not — " she faltered a bit,
but went on resolutely — "did not want
anything."
"Not work?" asked her caller, gently.
"Would you not like me to find some work
for you .?"
A sudden light came into the old eyes.
"Work — yes, if she could get that — "
36 NEIGHBORS
And then the reserve of the long, lonely
years broke down. She buried her face in
her hands and wept.
They found her a place to sew in a house
where she was made welcome as one of the
family. For all that, she went reluctantly.
All her stubborn pride went down before
the kindness of these strangers. She was
afraid that her hand had lost its cunning,
that she could not do justice to what was
asked of her, and she stipulated that she
should receive only a dollar for her day's
work, if she could earn that. When her
employer gave her the dollar at the end of
the day, the look that came into her face
made that woman turn quickly to hide her
tears.
The worst of Margaret Kelly's hardships
were over. She had a roof over her head,
LIFE'S BEST GIFT 37
and an "address." If she starved, that
was her affair. And slowly she opened her
heart to her new friends and gave them
room there. I have a letter of that day
from one of them that tells how they were
getting on : "She has a little box of a room
where she almost froze all winter. A
window right over her bed and no heat.
But she is a great old soldier and never
. whines. Occasionally she comes to see me,
and I give her something to eat, but what
she does between times God alone knows.
When I give her a little change, she goes to
the bake-shop, but I think otherwise goes
without and pretends she is not hungry.
A business man who knows her told her if
she needed nourishment to let him know;
she said she did not need anything. Her
face looks starvation. When she was ill
38 NEIGHBORS
in the winter, I tried to get her into a hos-
pital ; but she would not go, and no wonder.
If she had only a couple of dollars a week
she could get along, as I could get her cloth-
ing. She wears black for her sister."
The couple of dollars were found and the
hunger was banished with the homelessness.
Margaret Kelly had two days' work every
week, and in the feeling that she could sup-
port herself once more new life came to her.
She was content.
So two years passed. In the second
summer the old woman, now nearing eighty,
was sent out in the country for a vacation of
five or six weeks. She came back strong
and happy ; the rest and the peace had
sunk into her soul. " Some of the tragedy
has gone out of her face," her friend wrote
to me. She was looking forward with
LIFE'S BEST GIFT 39
courage to taking up her work again when
what seemed an unusual opportunity came
her way. A woman who knew her story
was going abroad, leaving her home up near
Riverside Drive in charge of a caretaker.
She desired a companion for her, and offered
the place to Miss Kelly. It was so much
better a prospect than the cold and cheer-
less hall room that her friends advised her
to accept, and Margaret Kelly moved into
the luxurious stone house uptown, and once
more was warmly and snugly housed for
the winter with congenial company.
Man proposes and God disposes. Along
in February came a deadly cold spell.
The thermometer fell below zero. In the
worst of it Miss Kelly's friend from the
"office," happening that way, rang the bell
to inquire how she was getting on. No
40 NEIGHBORS
one answered. She knocked at the base-
ment door, but received no reply. Con-
cluding that the two women were in an
upper story out of hearing of the bell, she
went away, and on her return later in the
day tried again, with no better success.
It was too cold for the people in the house
to be out, and her suspicions were aroused.
She went to the police station and returned
with help. The door was forced and the
house searched. In the kitchen they found
the two old women sitting dead by the stove,
one with her head upon the other's shoulder.
The fire had long been out and their bodies
were frozen. There was plenty of fuel in
the house. Apparently they had shut off
the draught to save coal and raised the lid
of the stove, perhaps to enjoy the glow of
the fire in the gloaming. The escaping
LIFE'S BEST GIFT 41
gas had put them both to sleep before they
knew their peril.
So the police and the coroner concluded.
"Two friends," said the official report.
Margaret Kelly had found more than food
and shelter. Life at the last had given her
its best gift, and her hungry old heart was
filled.
DRIVEN FROM HOME
"Doctor, what shall I do? My father
wants me to tend bar on Sunday. I am
doing it nights, but Sunday — I don't
want to. What shall I do ?"
The pastor of Olivet Church looked
kindly at the lad who stood before him,
cap in hand. The last of the Sunday-
school had trailed out ; the boy had waited
for this opportunity. Dr. Schauffler knew
and liked him as one of his bright boys.
He knew, too, his home — the sordid, hard-
fisted German father and his patient, long-
suffering mother.
"What do you think yourself, Karl?"
*'I don't want to, Doctor. I know it is
wrong."
42
DRIVEN FROM HOME 43
"All right then, don't."
"But he will kick me out and never take
me back. He told me so, and he'll do it."
"Well — "
The boy's face flushed. At fourteen, to
decide between home and duty is not easy.
And there was his mother. Knowing him,
the Doctor let him fight it out alone. Pres-
ently he squared his shoulders as one who
has made his choice.
"I can't help it if he does," he said ; " it
isn't right to ask me."
"If he does, come straight here. Good-
by!"
Sunday night the door-bell of the pastor's
study rang sharply. The Doctor laid down
his book and answered it himself. On the
threshold stood Karl with a small bundle
done up in a bandana handkerchief.
44 NEIGHBORS
"Well, I am fired," he said.
"Come in, then. I'll see you through."
The boy brought in his bundle. It con-
tained a shirt, three collars, and a pair of
socks, hastily gathered up in his retreat.
The Doctor hefted it.
"Going light," he smiled. "Men fight
better for it sometimes. Great battles
have been won without baggage trains."
The boy looked soberly at his all.
"I have got to win now, Doctor. Get me
a job, will you ? "
Things moved swiftly with Karl from that
Sunday. Monday morning saw him at
work as errand-boy in an office, earning
enough for his keep at the boarding-house
where his mother found him at times when
his father was alone keeping bar. That
night he registered at the nearest evening
DRIVEN FROM HOME 45
school to complete his course. The Doctor
kept a grip on his studies, as he had prom-
ised, and saw him through. It was not
easy sledding, but it was better than the
smelly saloon. From the public school he
graduated into the Cooper Institute, where
his teachers soon took notice of the wide-
awake lad. Karl was finding himself. He
took naturally to the study of languages, and
threw himself into it with all the ardor of an
army marching without baggage train to
meet an enemy. He had "got to win," and
he did. All the while he earned his living
working as a clerk by day — with very little
baggage yet to boast of — and sitting up
nights with his books. When he graduated
from the Institute, the battle was half won.
The other half he fought on his own
ground, with the enemy's tents in sight.
46 NEIGHBORS
His attainments procured for him a place in
the Lenox Library, where his opportunity
for reading was Hmited only by his ambi-
tion. He made American history and liter-
ature his special study, and in the course of
time achieved great distinction in his field.
*'And they were married and lived happily
ever after" might by right be added to his
story. He did marry an East Side girl
who had been his sweetheart while he was
fighting his uphill battle, and they have
to-day two daughters attending college.
It is the drawback to these stories that,
being true, they must respect the privacy of
their heroes. If that were not so, I should
tell you that this hero's name is not Karl,
but one much better befitting his fight and
his victory ; that he was chosen historian of
his home State, and held the office with
DRIVEN FROM HOME 47
credit until spoils politics thrust him aside,
and that he lives to-day in the capital city of
another State, an authority whose word is
not lightly questioned on any matter per-
taining to Americana. That is the record
of the East Side boy who was driven from
home for refusing to tend bar in his father's
saloon on Sunday because it was not right.
He never saw his father again. He tried
more than once, but the door of his home
was barred against him. Not with his
mother's consent ; in long after years, when
once again Dr. Schauffler preached at
Olivet, a little German woman came up
after the sermon and held out her hand to
him.
"You made my Karl a man," she said.
"No," replied the preacher, soberly,
"God made him."
THE PROBLEM OF THE WIDOW
SALVINI
The mere mention of the widow Salvini
always brings before me that other widow
who came to our settlement when her
rascal husband was dead after beating her
black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty
Gap, during which he did his best to make
ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls
by driving them out into the street to earn
money to buy him rum whenever he was
not on the Island, which, happily, he was
most of the time. I know I had a hand in
sending him there nineteen times, more
shame to the judge whom I finally had to
threaten with public arraignment and the
48
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 49
certainty of being made an accessory to
wife-murder unless he found a way of keep-
ing him there. He did then, and it was
during his long term that the fellow died.
What I started to say was that, when all
was over and he out of the way, his widow
came in and wanted our advice as to whether
she ought to wear mourning earrings in
his memory. Without rhyme or reason
the two are associated in my mind, for they
were as different as could be. The widow
of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a
brute. Mrs. Salvini was an Italian; her
husband was a hard-working fellow who
had the misfortune to be killed on the rail-
way. The point of contact is in the ear-
rings. The widow Salvini did wear mourn-
ing earrings, a little piece of crape draped
over the gold bangles of her care-free girl-
50 NEIGHBORS
hood, and it was not funny but infinitely
touching. It just shows how little things
do twist one's mind.
Signor Salvini was one of a gang of track-
men employed by the New York Central
Railroad. He was killed when they had
been in America two years, and left his wife
with two little children and one unborn.
There was a Workmen's Compensation Law
at the time under which she would have
been entitled to recover a substantial sum,
some $1800, upon proof that he was not
himself grossly to blame, and suit was
brought in her name ; but before it came
up the Court of Appeals declared the act
unconstitutional. The railway offered her
a hundred dollars, but Mrs. Salvini's law-
yer refused, and the matter took its slow
course through the courts. No doubt the
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 51
company considered that the business had
been properly dealt with. It is quite
possible that its well-fed and entirely
respectable directors went home from the
meeting at which counsel made his report
with an injured feeling of generosity unap-
preciated — they were not legally bound
to do anything. In which they were right.
Signor Salvini in life had belonged to a
benefit society of good intentions but poor
business ways. It had therefore become
defunct at the time of his death. However,
its members considered their moral obliga-
tions and pitied the widow. They were all
poor workingmen, but they dug down into
their pockets and raised two hundred dollars
for the stricken family. When the under-
taker and the cemetery and the other
civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead
52 NEIGHBORS
were paid, there was left twenty dollars
for the widow to begin life with anew.
When that weary autumn day had worn
to an end, the lingering traces of the death
vigil been removed, the two bare rooms set
to rights, and the last pitying neighbor
woman gone to her own, the widow sat with
her dumb sorrow by her slumbering little
ones, and faced the future with which she
was to battle alone. Just what advice the
directors of the railway that had killed her
husband — harsh words, but something
may be allowed the bitterness of such grief
as hers — would have given then, sur-
rounded by their own sheltered ones at
their happy firesides, I don't know. And
yet one might venture a safe guess if only
some kind spirit could have brought them
face to face in that hour. But it is a long
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 53
way from Madison Avenue to the poor
tenements of the Bronx, and even farther
— pity our poor limping democracy ! —
from the penniless Italian widow to her
sister in the fashionable apartment. As a
household servant in the latter the widow
Salvini would have been a sad misfit even
without the children; she would have
owned that herself. Her mistress would
not have been likely to have more patience
with her. And so that door through which
the two might have met to their mutual
good was closed. There were of course
the homes for the little ones, toward the
support of which the apartment paid its
share in the tax bills. The thought crossed
the mind of their mother as she sat there,
but at the sight of little Louisa and Vin-
cenzo, the baby, sleeping peacefully side
54 NEIGHBORS
by side, she put it away with a gesture of
impatience. It was enough to lose their
father; these she would keep. And she
crossed herself as she bowed reverently
toward the print of the Blessed Virgin,
before which burned a devout little taper.
Surely, She knew !
It came into her mind as she sat thinking
her life out that she had once learned to
crochet the fine lace of her native town, and
that she knew of a woman in the next block
who sold it to the rich Americans. Making
sure that the children were sound asleep,
she turned down the lamp, threw her shawl
over her head, and went to seek her.
The lace woman examined the small
sample of her old skill which she had
brought, and promised to buy what she
made. But she was not herself the seller,
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 55
and the price she got was very low. She
could pay even less. Unaccustomed fingers
would not earn much at lace-making;
everything depended on being quick at
it. But the widow knew nothing else. It
was at least work, and she went home to
take up the craft of her half-forgotten
youth.
But it was one thing to ply her needle
with deft young fingers and the songs of
sunny Italy in her ears, when the world and
its tasks were but play; another to bait
grim poverty with so frail a weapon in a
New York tenement, with the landlord to
pay and hungry children to feed. At the
end of the week, when she brought the
product of her toil to the lace woman, she
received in payment thirty cents. It was
all she had made, she was told.
56 NEIGHBORS
There was still the bigger part of her little
hoard ; but one more rent day, and that
would be gone. Thirty cents a week does
not feed three mouths, even with the thou-
sand little makeshifts of poverty that con-
stitute its resources. The good-hearted
woman next door found a spare potato or
two for the children ; the neighbor across
the hall, when she had corned beef for
dinner, brought her the water it was boiled
in for soup. But though neighbors were
kind, making lace was business, like run-
ning a railway, and its rule was the same —
to buy cheap, lives or lace, and sell dear.
It developed, moreover, that the industry
was sweated down to the last cent. There
was a whole string of women between the
seller and the widow at the end of the line,
who each gave up part of her poor earnings
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 57
to the one next ahead as her patron, or
padrone. The widow Salvini reduced the
chain of her industrial slavery by one link
when she quit making lace.
Upstairs in the tenement was a woman
who made willow plumes, that were just
then the fashion. To her went the widow
with the prayer that she teach her the busi-
ness, since she must work at home to take
care of her children ; and the other good-
naturedly gave her a seat at her table and
showed her the simple grips of her trade.
Simple enough they were, but demanding
an intensity of application, attention that
never flagged, and deft manipulation in
making the tiny knots that tie the vanes
of the feather together and make the droop
of the plume. Faithfully as she strove, the
most she could make was three inches in a
58 NEIGHBORS
day. The price paid was eleven cents an
inch. Thirty -three cents a day was better
than thirty cents a week, but still a long
way from the minimum wage we hear
about. It was then, when her little margin
was all gone and the rent due again, that
the baby came. And with it came the
charity workers, to back the helpful neigh-
borliness of the tenement that had never
failed.
When she was able to be about again, she
went back to her task of making plumes.
But the work went slower than before.
The baby needed attention, and there were
the beds to make and the washing for two
lodgers, who paid the rent and to whom the
charity workers closed their eyes even if
they had not directly connived at procur-
ing them. It is thus that the grim facts
THE WIDOW SALVINFS PROBLEM 59
of poverty set at naught all the benevolent
purposes of those who fight it. It had
forced upon the widow home-work and the
lodger, two curses of the tenement, and now
it added the third in child labor. Little
Louisa's .fingers were nimbler than her
mother's. She was only eight, but she
learned soon to tie a plume as well as the
mother. The charity visitor, who had
all the economic theories at her fingers'
ends and knew their soundness only too
well, stood by and saw her do it, and found
it neither in her heart nor in her reason to
object, for was she not struggling to keep
her family together ? Five-year-old Vin-
cenzo watched them work.
"Could he make a plume, too.^" she
asked, with a sudden sinking of the heart.
Yes, but not so fast ; his wee hands grew
60 NEIGHBORS
tired so soon. And the widow let him show
how he could tie the little strange knot.
The baby rolled on the floor, crooning and
sucking the shears.
In spite of the reenforcement, the work
lagged. The widow's eyes were giving out
and she grew more tired every day Four
days the three had labored over one plume,
and finished it at last. To-morrow she
would take it to the factory and receive
for it ninety cents. But even this scant
wage was threatened. Willow plumes were
going out of fashion, and the harassed
mother would have to make another start.
At what ?
The question was answered a month later
as it must, not as it should be, when to the
three failures of the plan of well-ordered
philanthropy was added the fourth : Louisa
THE WIDOW SALVINI'S PROBLEM 61
and Vincenzo were put in the "college," as
the Italians call the orphan asylum. The
charity workers put them there in order that
they might have proper food and enough of
it. Willow plumes having become a drug
in the market, the widow went into a
factory, paying a neighbor in the tenement
a few cents a day for taking care of the baby
in her absence. As an unskilled hand she
was able to earn a bare living. One poor
home, that was yet a happy home once, was
wiped out. The widow's claim against the
railway company still waits upon the court
calendar.^
Such as it is, it is society's present solu-
tion of the problem of the widow Salvini.
If any find fault with it, let them not blame
the charity workers, for they did what they
^Her claim has since been settled for $1000.
62 NEIGHBORS
could ; nor the railway company, for its
ways are the ways of business, not of phil-
anthropy ; nor our highest court, for we are
told that impious is the hand that is
stretched forth toward that ark of the
covenant of our liberties. Let them put
the blame where it belongs — upon us all
who for thirty years have been silent under
the decision which forbade the abolition of
industrial slavery in the Bohemian cigar-
makers' tenements because it would inter-
fere with *'the sacredness and hallowed
associations of the people's homes." That
was the exact phrase, if memory serves me
right. Such was the sowing of our crop
of social injustice. Shall a man gather
figs from thistles ?
PETER
Miss Wald of the Nurses' Settlement
told me the story of Peter, and I set it down
here as I remember it. She will forgive
the slips. Peter has nothing to forgive;
rather, he would not have were he alive.
He was all to the good for the friendship he
gave and took. Looking at it across the
years, it seems as if in it were the real Peter.
The other, who walked around, was a poor
knave of a pretender.
This was Miss Wald's story : —
He came to me with the card of one of
our nurses, a lanky, slipshod sort of fellow
of nineteen or thereabouts. The nurse had
run across him begging in a tenement.
63
64 NEIGHBORS
When she asked him why he did that, he
put a question himself: "Where would a
fellow beg if not among the poor ? " And
now there he stood, indifferent, bored if
anything, shiftless, yet with some indefinite
appeal, waiting to see what I would do.
She had told him that he had better go and
see me, and he had come. He had done his
part ; it was up to me now.
He was a waiter, he said, used to working
South in the winter, but it was then too late.
He had been ill. He suppressed a little
hacking cough that told its own story ; he
was a "lunger." Did he tramp ? Yes, he
said, and I noticed that his breath smelled
of whisky. He made no attempt to hide
the fact.
I explained to him that I might send him
to some place in the country where he could
r
/r.r-.f V.V.
THERE HE STOOD, INDIFFERENT, BORED IF ANYTHING,
SHIFTLESS."
PETER 65
get better during the winter, but that it
would be so much effort wasted if he drank.
He considered a while, and nodded in his
curious detached way ; he guessed he could
manage without it, if he had plenty of hot
coffee. The upshot of it was that he ac-
cepted my condition and went.
Along in midwinter our door-bell was
rung one night, and there stood Peter.
"Oh! did you come back.^ Too bad!"
It slipped out before I had time to think.
But Peter bore with me. He smiled reas-
surance. *'I did not run av/ay. The place
burned down ; we were sent back.'*
It was true; I remembered. But the
taint of whisky was on his breath. "You
have been drinking again," I fretted.
"You spent your money for that — "
"No," said he; "a man treated me."
66 NEIGHBORS
"And did you have to take whisky?'*
There was no trace of resentment in his
retort : *' Well, now, what would he have
said if I'd took milk?" It was as one
humoring a child.
He went South on a waiter job. From
St. Augustine he sent me a letter that
ended : " Write me in care of the post-
office ; it is the custom of the town to get
your letters there." Likely it was the first
time in his life that he had had a mail
address. "This is a very nice place," ran
his comment on the old Spanish town,
"but for business give me New York."
The Wanderlust gripped Peter, and I
heard from him next in the Southwest. For
years letters came from him at long inter-
vals, showing that he had not forgotten me.
Once another tramp called on me with
PETER 67
greeting from him and a request for shoes.
When "business" next took Peter to New
York and he called, I told him that I valued
his acquaintance, but did not care for that
of many more tramps. He knew the man
at once.
"Oh," he said, "isn't he a rotter.^ I
didn't think he would do that." They were
tramping in Colorado, he explained, and one
night the other man told him of his mother.
Peter, in the intimacy of the camp-fire,
spoke of me. The revelation of the other's
baseness was like the betrayal of some
sacred rite. I would not have liked to be in
the man's place when next they met, if they
ever did.
Some months passed, and then one day a
message came from St. Joseph's Home : "I
guess I am up against it this time." He did
68 NEIGHBORS
not want to trouble me, but would I come
and say good-by ? I went at once. Peter
was dying, and he knew it. Sitting by his
bed, my mind went back to our first meet-
ing — perhaps his did too — and I said :
*'You have been real decent several times,
Peter. You must have come of good
people; don't you want me to find them
for you ? " He didn't seem to care very
much, but at last he gave me the address
in Boston of his only sister. But she had
moved, and it was a long and toilsome
task to find her. In the end, however,
a friend located her for me. She was a
poor Irish dressmaker, and Peter's old
father lived with her. She wrote in an-
swer to my summons that they would
come, if Peter wanted them very much,
but that it would be a sacrifice. He
PETER 69
had always been their great trial — a
born tramp and idler.
Peter was chewing a straw when I told
him. I had come none too soon. His
face told me that. He heard me out in
silence. When I asked if he wanted me
to send for them, he stopped chewing a
while and ruminated.
"They might send me the money in-
stead," he decided, and resumed his straw.
KA^TE'S CHOICE
My winter lecture travels sometimes
bring me to a town not a thousand miles
from New York, where my mail awaits me.
If it happens then, as it often does, that
it is too heavy for me to attack alone —
for it is the law that if a man live by the
pen he shall pay the penalty in kind — I
send for a stenographer, and in response
there comes a knock at my door that
ushers in a smiling young woman, who
answers my inquiries after *' Grandma"
with the assurance that she is very well
indeed, though she is getting older every
day. As to her, I can see for myself
that she is fine, and I wonder secretly
70
KATE'S CHOICE 71
where the young men's eyes are that she
is still Miss Murray. Before I leave town,
unless the train table is very awkward, I
am sure to call on Grandma for a chat
— in office hours, for then the old lady
will exhibit to me with unreserved pride
"the child's" note-book, with the pot-
hooks which neither of us can make out,
and tell me what a wonderful girl she is.
And I cry out with the old soul in rapture
over it all, and go away feeling happily
that the world is all right with two such
people in it as Kate Murray and her grand-
mother, though the one is but a plain
stenographer and the other an old Irish-
woman, but with the faithful, loving heart
of her kind. To me there is no better
kind anywhere, and Grandma Linton is
the type as she is the flower of it. So
72 NEIGHBORS
that you shall agree with me I will tell
you their story, her story and the child's,
exactly as they have lived it, except that
I will not tell you the name of the town
they live in or their own true names, be-
cause Kate herself does not know all of
it, and it is best that she shall not — yet.
When I say at the very outset that
Margaret Linton, Kate's mother, was
Margaret Linton all her brief sad life,
you know the reason why, and there is no
need of saying more. She was a brave,
good girl, innocent as she was handsome.
At nineteen she was scrubbing offices to
save her widowed mother, whom rheuma-
tism had crippled. That was how she met
the young man who made love to her, and
listened to his false promises, as girls have
done since time out of mind to their un-
KATE'S CHOICE 73
doing. She was nineteen when her baby
was born. From that day, as long as she
lived, no word of reproach fell from her
mother's lips. "My Maggie" was more
than ever the pride of the widow's heart
since the laughter had died in her bonny
eyes. It was as if in the fatherless child
the strongest of all bonds had come between
the two silent women. Poor Margaret
closed her eyes with the promise of her
mother that she would never forsake her
baby, and went to sleep with a tired little
sigh.
Kate was three years old when her
mother died. It was no time then for
Grandma Linton to be bothered with the
rheumatics. It was one thing to be a
worn old woman with a big strong daughter
to do the chores for you, quite another
74 NEIGHBORS
to have this young Hfe crying out to you
for food and shelter and care, a winsome
elf putting two plump little arms around
one's neck and whispering with her mouth
close to your ear, "I love oo, Grannie."
With the music of the baby voice in her
ears the widow girded up her loins and
went out scrubbing, cleaning, became
janitress of the tenement in which she
and Kate occupied a two-room flat — any-
thing so that the thorns should be plucked
from the path of the child's blithesome
feet. Seven years she strove for her
"lamb." When Kate was ten and getting
to be a big girl, she faced the fact that
she could do it no longer. She was get-
ting too old.
What struggles it cost, knowing her,
I can guess; but she brought that sacri-
KATE'S CHOICE 75
fice too. Friends who were good to the
poor undertook to pay the rent. She
could earn enough to keep them; that
she knew. But they soon heard that the
two were starving. Poor neighbors were
sharing their meals with them, who them-
selves had scarce enough to go around;
and from Kate's school came the report
that she was underfed. Her grand-
mother's haggard face told the same story
plainly. There was still the "county"
where no one starves, however else she
fares, and they tried to make her see that
it was her duty to give up and let the
child be cared for in an institution. But
against that Grandma Linton set her face
like flint. She was her Maggie's own,
and stay with her she would, as she had
promised, as long as she could get around
•re NEIGHBORS
at all. And with that she reached for
her staff — her old enemy, the rheumat-
ics, was just then getting in its worst
twinges, as if to mock her — and set out
to take up her work.
But it was all a vain pretense, and her
friends knew it. They were at their wits'
end until it occurred to them to lump
two families in one. There was another
widow, a younger woman with four small
children, the youngest a baby, who
was an unsolved problem to them. The
mother had work, and was able to do it;
but she could not be spared from home
as things were. They brought the two
women together. They liked one another,
and took eagerly to the "club" plan. In
the compact that was made Mrs. Linton
became the housekeeper of the common
KATE'S CHOICE 77
home, with five children to care for instead
of one, while the mother of the young
brood was set free to earn the living for
the household.
Mother Linton took up her new and
congenial task with the whole-hearted
devotion with which she had carried out
her promise to Maggie. She mothered
the family of untaught children and
brought them up as her own. They had
been running wild, but grew well-man-
nered and attractive, to her great pride.
They soon accepted her as their veri-
table "grannie," and they call her that
to this day.
The years went by, and Kate, out of
short skirts, got her "papers" at the
school and went forth to learn typewrit-
ing. She wanted her own home then.
78 NEIGHBORS
and the partnership which had proved
so mutually helpful was dissolved. Kate
was getting along well, with steady work
in an office, when the great crisis came.
Grandma became so feeble that their
friends once more urged her removal to
an institution, where she could be made
comfortable, instead of having to make
a home for her granddaughter. When,
as before, she refused to hear of it, they
tried to bring things to a head by refus-
ing any longer to contribute toward the
rent. They did it with fear and trem-
bling, but they did not know those two,
after all. The day notice had been given
Kate called at the office.
She came to thank her friends for their
help in the past. It was all right for
them to stop now, she said; it was her
KATE'S CHOICE 79
turn. "Grandma took care of me when
I was a little girl for years ; now I can
take care of her. I am earning five dollars
a week; that is more than when you first
helped us, and I shall soon get a raise.
Grannie and I will move into other rooms
that are not so high up, for the stairs are
hard on her. She shall stay with me
while she lives and I will mind her."
She was as good as her word. With
her own hands and the aid of every man
in the tenement who happened to be
about, she moved their belongings to the
new home, while the mothers and children
cheered her on the way. They live not
far from there to-day, year by year more
snugly housed, for Kate is earning a
stenographer's pay now. Her employers
in the office raised her wages when they
80 NEIGHBORS
heard, through her friends, of Kate's
plucky choice; but that is another thing
Kate Murray does not know. Since then
she has set up in business for herself.
Grandma, as I told you, is still living,
getting younger every day, in her adora-
tion of the young woman who moves
about her, light-footed and light-hearted,
patting her pillow, smoothing her snowy
hair, and showing affection for her in a
thousand little ways. Sometimes when
the young woman sings the old Irish songs
that Grandma herself taught the girl's
mother as a child, she looks up with a
start, thinking it is her Maggie come
back. Then she remembers, and a shadow
flits across her kind old face. If Kate
sees it, she steals up behind her, and,
putting two affectionate arms around her
'if KATE SEKS IT, SHE STEALS 11' HEHIM) HEK. AM), PlTTINii
TWO AFFECTIONATE ARMS AROUXO HER NECK, WHISPERS IN
HER EAR, 'I LOVE OO, GRANNIE.""
KATE'S CHOICE 81
neck, whispers in her ear, "I love oo.
Grannie," and the elder woman laughs
and lives again in the blessed present.
At such times I wonder how much Kate
really does know. But she keeps her
own counsel.
THE MOTHER'S HEAVEN
The door-bell of the Nurses' Settlement
rang loudly one rainy night, and a Polish
Jewess demanded speech with Miss Wald.
This was the story she told : She scrubbed
halls and stairs in a nice tenement on the
East Side. In one of the flats lived the
Schaibles, a young couple not long in the
country. He was a music teacher. Believ-
ing that money was found in the streets of
America, they furnished their flat finely on
the installment plan, expecting that he
would have many pupils, but none came.
A baby did instead, and when they were
three, what with doctor and nurse, their
money went fast. Now it was all gone;
8ie
THE MOTHER'S HEAVEN 83
the installment collector was about to seize
their furniture for failure to pay, and they
would lose all. The baby was sick and
going to die. It would have to be buried
in *'the trench," for the father and mother
were utterly friendless and penniless.
She told the story dispassionately, as
one reciting an every-day event in tene-
ment-house life, until she came to the sick
baby. Then her soul was stirred.
"I couldn't take no money out of that
house," she said. She gave her day's
pay for scrubbing to the poor young
couple and came straight to Miss Wald
to ask her to send a priest to them. She
had little ones herself, and she knew that
the mother's heart was grieved because
she couldn't meet the baby in her heaven
if it died and was buried like a dog.
84 NEIGHBORS
*"Tain't mine," she added with a little
conscious blush at Miss Wald's curious
scrutiny; *'but it wouldn't be heaven to
her without her child, would it?"
They are not Roman Catholics at the
Nurses' Settlement, either, as it happens,
but they know the way well to the priest's
door. Before the night was an hour older
a priest was in the home of the young
people, and with him came a sister of
charity. Save the baby they could not, but
keep it from the Potter's Field they could
and did. It died, and was buried with all the
comforting blessings of the Church, and the
poor young parents were no longer friend-
less. The installment collector, met by
Miss Wald in person, ceased to be a terror.
"And to think," said that lady indig-
nantly from behind the coffee urn in
THE MOTHER'S HEAVEN 85
the morning, "to think that they don't
have a pupil, not a single one !"
The residenters seated at the breakfast
table laid down their spoons with a com-
mon accord and gazed imploringly at her.
They were used to having their heads
shampooed for the cause by unskilled
hands, to have their dry goods spoiled by
tyros at dressmaking, and they knew the
signs.
"Leading lady," they chorused, "oh,
leading lady ! Have we got to take music
lessons ?"
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR
"Go quickly, please, to No. — East
Eleventh Street, near the river," was the
burden of a message received one day in
the Charities Building; "a Hungarian
family is in trouble." The little word
that covers the widest range in the lan-
guage gives marching orders daily to many
busy feet thereabouts, and, before the
October sun had set, a visitor from the
Association for the Improvement of the
Condition of the Poor had climbed to the
fourth floor of the tenement and found
the Josefy family. This was what she
discovered there : a man in the last stages
of consumption, a woman within two
86
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 87
weeks of her confinement, five hungry
children, a landlord clamoring for his rent.
The man had long ceased to earn the
family living. His wife, taking up that
burden with the rest, had worked on
cloaks for a sweater until she also had to
give up. In fact, the work gave out just
as their need was greatest. Now, with
the new baby coming, no preparation had
been made to receive it. For those al-
ready there, there was no food in the
house.
They had once been well off. Josefy
was a tailor, and had employed nearly a
score of hands in the busy season. He
paid forty-four dollars a month rent then.
That day the landlord had threatened to
dispossess them for one month's arrears
of seven dollars, and only because of the
88 NEIGHBORS,
rain had given them a day's grace. All
the money saved up in better days had
gone to pay doctor and druggist, without
making Josefy any better. His wife lis-
tened dismally to the recital of their
troubles and asked for work — any light
work that she could do.
The rent was paid, and the baby came.
They were eight then, subsisting, as the
society's records show, in January on the
earnings of Mrs. Josefy making ladies'
blouse sleeves at twenty-five cents a dozen
pairs, in February on the receipts of em-
broidering initials on napkins at fifteen
cents apiece, in March on her labors in a
downtown house on sample cloaks. Three
dollars a week was her wage there. To
save car-fare she walked to her work
and back, a good two miles each way,
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 89
getting up at 3 a.m. to do her home wash-
ing and cleaning first. In bad weather
they were poorer by ten cents a day,
because then she had to ride. The neigh-
bors were kind ; the baker left them bread
twice a week and the butcher gave them
a little meat now and then. The father's
hemorrhages were more frequent. When,
on a slippery day, one of the children,
going for milk, fell in the street and spilled
it, he went without his only food, as they
had but eight cents in the house. In
May came the end. The tailor died, and
in the house of mourning there was one
care less, one less to feed and clothe.
The widow gathered her flock close and
faced the future dry-eyed. The luxury
of grief is not for those at close grips with
stern poverty.
90 NEIGHBORS
When word reached far-off Hungary,
Mrs. Josefy's sister wrote to her to come
back; she would send the money. The
widow's friends rejoiced, but she shook
her head. To face poverty as bitter
there ? This was her children's country ;
it should be hers too. At the Consulate
they reasoned with her; the chance was
too good to let pass. When she persisted,
they told her to put the children in a home,
then ; she could never make her way
with so many. No doubt they considered
her an ungrateful person when she flatly
refused to do either. It is not in the
record that she ever darkened the door of
the Consulate again.
The charitable committee had no better
success. They offered her passage money,
and she refused it. "She is always look-
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 91
ing for work," writes the visitor in the regis-
ter, for once in her life a little resentfully,
it would almost seem. When finally
tickets came at the end of a year, Victor,
the oldest boy, must finish his schooling
first. Exasperated, the committee issues its
ultimatum : she must go, or put the children
away. Dry bread was the family fare when
Mrs. Josefy was confronted with it, but she
met it as firmly : Never ! she would stay
and do the best she could.
The record which I have followed states
here that the committee dropped her,
but stood by to watch the struggle, half
shamefacedly one cannot help thinking,
though they had given the best advice
they knew. Six months later the widow
reports that "the children had never
wanted something to eat."
92 NEIGHBORS
At this time Victor is offered a job,
two dollars and a half a week, with a chance
of advancement. The mother goes out
house-cleaning. Together they live on
bread and coffee to save money for the
rent, but she refuses the proffered relief.
Victor is in the graduating class ; he must
finish his schooling. Just then her sewing-
machine is seized for debt. The com-
mittee, retreating in a huff after a fresh
defeat over the emigration question,
hastens to the rescue, glad of a chance,
and it is restored. In sheer admiration
at her pluck they put it down that '*she
is doing the best she can to keep her family
together." There is a curious little entry
here that sizes up the children. They
had sent them to Coney Island on a vaca-
tion, but at night they were back home.
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 93
I
"No one spoke to them there," is their
explanation. They had their mother's
pride.
It happened in the last month of that
year that I went out to speak in a subur-
ban New Jersey town. "Neighbors" was
my topic. I was the guest of the secre-
tary of a Foreign Mission Board that has
its oflSce in the Presbyterian Building on
Fifth Avenue. That night when we sat
at dinner the talk ran on the modern
methods of organized charity. "Yes,"
said my host, as his eyes rested on the
quiverful seated around the board, "it
is all good. But best of all would be if
you could find for me a widow, say, with
children like my own, whom my wife could
help in her own way, and the children
learn to take an interest in. I have no
94 NEIGHBORS
chance, as you know. The office claims
all my time. But they — that would be
best of all, for them and for us."
And he was right ; that would be charity
in the real meaning of the word : friend-
ship, the neighborly lift that gets one over
the hard places in the road. The other
half would cease to be, on that plan, and
we should all be one great whole, pulling
together, and our democracy would be-
come real. I promised to find him such
a widow.
But it proved a harder task than I had
thought. None of the widows I knew
had six children. The charitable societies
had no family that fitted my friend's
case. But in time I found people who
knew about Mrs. Josef y. The children
were right — so many boys and so many
WHEN' WE HAI) SET UP A CHRISTMAS TREE TOGETHER, TO THE
WILD DELIGHT OF THE CHILDREN."
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 95
girls; what they told me of the mother
made me want to know more. I went
over to East Eleventh Street at once.
On the way the feeling grew upon me that
I had found my friend's Christmas pres-
ent — I forgot to say that it was on
Christmas Eve — and when I saw them
and gathered something of the fight that
splendid little woman had waged for her
brood those eight long years, I knew that
my search was over. When we had set
up a Christmas tree together, to the wild
delight of the children, and I had ordered a
good dinner from a neighboring restaurant
on my friend's account, I hastened back to
tell him of my good luck and his. I knew
he was late at the ofiice with his mail.
Half-way across town it came to me
with a sense of shock that I had forgotten
96 NEIGHBORS
something. Mrs. Josefy had told me that
she scrubbed in a public building, but
where I had not asked. Perhaps it would
not have seemed important to you. It
did to me, and when I had gone all the
way back and she answered my question,
I knew why. Where do you suppose she
scrubbed ? In the Presbyterian Building !
Under his own roof was the neighbor he
sought. Almost they touched elbows, yet
were they farther apart than the poles.
Were, but no longer to be. The very next
day brought my friend and his wife in from
their Jersey home to East Eleventh Street.
Long years after I found this entry on the
register, under date January 20, 1899 :
"Mrs. Josefy states that she never had
such a happy Christmas since she came
to this country. The children were all
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 97
so happy, and every one had been so kind
to them."
It was the beginning of better days for
the Josefy family. Weary stretches of
hard road there were ahead yet, but they
were no longer lonesome. The ladies*
committee that had once so hotly blamed
her were her friends to the last woman,
for she had taught them with her splendid
pluck what it should mean to be a mother
of Americans. They did not offer to carry
her then any more than before, but they
went alongside with words of neighborly
cheer and saw her win over every obstacle.
Two years later finds her still working in
the Presbyterian Building earning sixteen
dollars a month and leaving her home at
five in the morning. Her oldest boy is
making four dollars and a half a week,
98 NEIGHBORS
and one of the girls is learning dressmaking.
The others are all in school. One may be
sure without asking that they are not
laggards there. When the youngest, at
twelve, is wanted by her friends of the
mission board to "live out" with them,
the mother refuses to let her go, at the
risk of displeasing her benefactors. The
child must go to school and learn a trade.
Three years more, and all but the youngest
are employed. Mrs. Josefy has had a
long illness, but she reports that she can
help herself. They are now paying four-
teen dollars a month rent. On April 6,
1904, the last entry but one is made on
the register : the family is on dry ground
and the "case is closed."
The last but one. That one was added
after a gap of eight years when I made
WHERE HE FOUND HIS NEIGHBOR 99
inquiries for the Josefys the other day.
Eight years is a long time in the Charities
Buildings with a heavy burden of human
woe and failure. Perhaps for that very
reason they had not forgotten Mrs. Josefy,
but they had lost trace of her. She had
left her old home in Eleventh Street, and
all that was known was that she was
somewhere up near Fort Washington. I
asked that they find her for me, and a
week later I read this entry in the reg-
ister, where, let us hope, the case of the
Josefys is now closed for all time :
"The Josefys live now at No. — West
One Hundred and Eighty — st Street in a
handsome flat of six sunny rooms. The
oldest son, who is a cashier in a broker's
oflBce on a salary of $35 a week, is the head
of the family. His brother earns $20 a
100 NEIGHBORS
week in a downtown business. Two of
the daughters are happily married ; an-
other is a stenographer. The youngest,
the baby of the dark days in the East
Side tenement, was graduated from school
last year and is ready to join the army of
workers. The mother begins to feel her
years, but is happy with her children."
Some Christmas Eve I will go up and
see them and take my friend from the
Presbyterian Building along.
This is the story of a poor woman,
daughter of a proud and chivalrous people,
whose sons have helped make great for-
tunes grow in our land and have received
scant pay and scantier justice in return,
and of whom it is the custom of some
Americans to speak with contempt as
"Huns."
WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD
The first snowflake was wafted in upon
the north wind to-day. I stood in my
study door and watched it fall and dis-
appear; but I knew that many would
come after and hide my garden from sight
ere long. What will the winter bring us ?
When they wake once more, the flowers
that now sleep snugly under their blanket
of dead leaves, what shall we have to tell ?
The postman has just brought me a
letter, and with it lying open before me,
my thoughts wandered back to "the hard
winter" of a half -score seasons ago which
none of us has forgotten, when women and
children starved in cold garrets while men
101
102 NEIGHBORS
roamed gaunt and hollow-eyed vainly seek-
ing work. I saw the poor tenement in
Rivington Street where a cobbler and his
boy were fighting starvation all alone
save for an occasional visit from one of
Miss Wald's nurses who kept a watchful
eye on them as on so many another totter-
ing near the edge in that perilous time,
ready with the lift that brought back hope
when all things seemed at an end. One
day she found a stranger in the flat, a
man with close-cropped hair and a hard
look that told their own story. The
cobbler eyed her uneasily, and, when she
went, followed her out and made excuses.
Yes ! he was just out of prison and had
come to him for shelter. He used to
know him in other days, and Jim was
not —
WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD 103
She interrupted him and shook her head.
Was it good for the boy to have that kind
of a man in the house ?
The cobbler looked at her thought-
fully and touched her arm gently.
"This," he said, "ain't no winter to
let a feller from Sing Sing be on the street."
The letter the postman brought made
me see all this and more in the snowflake
that fell and melted in my garden. It
came from a friend in the far West, a
gentle, high-bred lady, and told me this
story : Her sister, who devotes her life
to helping the neighbor, had just been on
a visit to her home. One day my friend
noticed her wearing an odd knitted shawl,
and spoke of it.
*'Yes," said she, "that is the shawl
the cook gave me."
104 NEIGHBORS
"The cook?" with lifted eyebrows, I
suppose. And then she heard how.
One day, going through the kitchen of
the institution where she teaches, she
had seen the cook in tears and inquired
the cause. The poor woman sobbed out
that her daughter had come home to die.
The doctors had said that she might live
perhaps ten days, no longer, and early
and late she cried for her mother to be with
her. But she had vainly tried every way
to get a cook to take her place — there was
none, and her child was dying in the hospital.
"And I told her to go to her right away,
I would see to that; that was all," con-
cluded my friend's sister; "and she gave
me this shawl when she came back, and
I took it, of course. She had worked it
for the daughter that died."
WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD 105
But it was not all. For during ten days
of sweltering July heat that gentle, deli-
cate woman herself superintended the
kitchen, did the cooking, and took the
place of the mother who was soothing
her dying child's brow, and no one knew
it. Not here, that is. No doubt it is
known, with a hundred such daily hap-
penings that make the real story of human
life, where that record is kept and cher-
ished.
And clear across the continent it comes
to solve a riddle that had puzzled me.
Recently I had long arguments with a
friend about religion and dogmas that
didn't help either of us. At the end of
three weeks we were farther apart than
when we began, and the arguments had
grown into controversy that made us both
106 NEIGHBORS
unhappy. We had to have a regular treaty
of peace to get over it. I know why now.
The snowflake and my friend's letter
told me. Those two, the cobbler and the
woman, were real Christians. They had
the secret. They knew the neighbor, if
neither had ever heard of dogma or creed.
Our arguments were worse than wasted,
though we both meant well, for we were
nearer neighbors when we began than
when we left off.
I am not learned in such things. Per-
haps I am wrong. No doubt dogmas are
useful — to wrap things in — but even
then I would not tuck in the ends, lest
we hide the neighbor so that we cannot
see him. After all, it is what is in the
package that counts. To me it is the
evidence of such as these that God lives
WHAT THE SNOWFLAKE TOLD 107
in human hearts — that we are molded
in his image despite flaws and failures in
the casting — that keeps alive the belief
that we shall wake with the flowers to
a fairer spring. Is it not so with all of
us?
THE CITY'S HEART
"Bosh !" said my friend, jabbing im-
patiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in
the gutter, " all bosh ! A city has no heart.
It's incorporated selfishness ; has to be.
Slopping over is not business. City is all
business. A poet's dream, my good fellow ;
pretty but moonshine !"
We turned the corner of the tenement
street as he spoke. The placid river was
before us, with the moonlight upon it.
Far as the eye reached, up and down the
stream, the shores lay outlined by rows
of electric lamps, like strings of shining
pearls ; red lights and green fights moved
upon the water. From a roofed-over pier
108
THE CITY'S HEART 109
near by came the joyous shouts of troops
of children, and the rhythmic tramp of
many feet to the strains of "Could you be
true to eyes of blue if you looked into
eyes of brown?" A "play-pier" in even-
ing session.
I looked at my friend. He stood gaz-
ing out over the river, hat in hand, the
gentle sea-breeze caressing the lock at
his temple that is turning gray. Some-
thing he started to say had died on his
lips. He was listening to the laughter of
the children. What thoughts of days long
gone, before the oflBce and the market
reports shut youth and sunshine out of
his life, came to soften the hard lines in
his face, I do not know. As I watched,
the music on the pier died away in a great
hush. The river with its lights was gone ;
110 NEIGHBORS
my friend was gone. The years were
gone with their burden. The world was
young once more.
I was in a court-room full of men with
pale, stern faces. I saw a child brought
in, carried in a horse-blanket, at the sight
of which men wept aloud. I saw it laid
at the feet of the judge, who turned his
face away, and in the stillness of that
court-room I heard a voice raised claim-
ing for the human child the protection
men had denied it, in the name of the home-
less cur of the street. And I heard the
story of little Mary Ellen told again, that
stirred the souls of a city and roused the
conscience of a world that had forgotten.
The sweet-faced missionary who found
Mary Ellen was there, wife of a newspaper
man — happy augury ; where the gospel
THE CITY'S HEART 111
of faith and the gospel of facts join hands
the world moves. She told how the poor
consumptive in the dark slum tenement,
at whose bedside she daily read the Bible,
could not die in peace while *'the child
they called Mary Ellen" was beaten and
tortured in the next, flat; and how on
weary feet she went from door to door of
the powerful, vainly begging mercy for
it and peace for her dying friend. The
police told her to furnish evidence, prove
crime, or they could not move; the socie-
ties said: "bring the child to us legally,
and we will see; till then we can do noth-
ing"; the charitable said, "it is danger-
ous to interfere between parent and child;
better let it alone." And the judges said
that it was even so; it was for them to
see that men walked in the way laid down,
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not to find it — until her woman's heart
rebelled in anger against it all, and she
sought the great friend of the dumb brute,
who made a way.
"The child is an animal," he said. "If
there is no justice for it as a human being,
it shall at least have the rights of the
cur in the street. It shall not be abused.'*
And as I looked I knew that I was where
the first charter of the Children's rights
was written under warrant of that made
for the dog; for from that dingy court-
room, whence a wicked woman went to
jail, thirty years ago came forth the
Children's Society, with all it has meant
to the world's life. It is quickening its
pulse to this day in lands and among
peoples who never spoke the name of my
city and Mary Ellen's. For her — her
THE CITY'S HEART 113
life has run since like an even summer
stream between flowery shores. When last
I had news of her, she was the happy wife
of a prosperous farmer up-State.
The lights on the river shone out once
more. From the pier came a chorus of
children's voices singing *' Sunday After-
noon" as only East Side children can.
My friend was listening intently. Aye,
well did I remember the wail that came
to the Police Board, in the days that are
gone, from a pastor over there. "The
children disturb our worship," he wrote ;
*'they gather in the street at my church
and sing and play while we would pray";
and the bitter retort of the police captain
of the precinct: "They have no other
place to play; better pray for sense to
help them get one." I saw him the other
114 NEIGHBORS
day — the preacher — singing to the
children in the tenement street and giving
them flowers ; and I knew that the day of
sense and of charity had swept him with
it.
The present is swallowed up again, and
there rises before me the wraith of a vil-
lage church in the far-off mountains of
Pennsylvania. It is Sunday morning at
midsummer. In the pulpit a young clergy-
man is preaching from the text: "Inas-
much as ye did it unto one of these my
brethren, even the least, ye did it unto
me." The sun peeps through the win-
dows, where climbing roses nod. In the
tall maples a dove is cooing; the drowsy
hum of the honey-bee is on the air. But
he recks not of these, nor of the peaceful
day. His soul has seen a vision of hot
THE CITY'S HEART 115
and stony streets, of squalid homes, of
hard-visaged, unlovely childhood, of man-
kind made in His image twisted by want
and ignorance into monstrous deformity :
and the message he speaks goes straight
to the heart of the plain farmers on the
benches; His brethren these, and steeped
in the slum ! They gather round him
after the service, their hearts burning
within them.
I see him speeding the next day toward
the great city, a messenger of love and
pity and help. I see him return before
the week's end, nine starved urchins cling-
ing to his hands and the skirts of his coat,
the first Fresh Air party that went out of
New York twoscore years ago. I see
the big-hearted farmers take them into
their homes and hearts. I see the sun
116 NEIGHBORS
and the summer wind put back color in
the wan cheek, and life in the shrunken
and starved frame. I hear the message
of one of the little ones to her chums left
behind in the tenement: "I can have
two pieces of pie to eat, and nobody
says nothing if I take three pieces of cake " ;
and I know what it means to them.
Laugh ? Yes ! laugh and be glad. The
world has sorrow enough. Let in the
sunshine where you can, and know that
it means life to these, life now and a glimpse
of the hereafter. I can hear it yet, the
sigh of the tired mother under the trees
on Twin Island, our Henry-street children's
summer home: "If heaven is like this,
I don't care how soon I go."
For the sermon had wings ; and whither-
soever it went blessings sprang in its track.
THE CITY'S HEART 117
Love and justice grew; men read the
brotherhood into the sunlight and the
fields and the woods, and the brotherhood
became real. I see the minister, no longer
so young, sitting in his oflSce in the "Trib-
une" building, still planning Fresh Air
holidays for the children of the hot, stony
city. But he seeks them himself no more.
A thousand churches, charities, kinder-
gartens, settlements, a thousand preachers
and doers of the brotherhood, gather them
in. A thousand trains of many crowded
cars carry them to the homes that are
waiting for them wherever men and women
with warm hearts live. The message has
traveled to the farthest shores, and no-
where in the Christian world is there a
place where it has not been heard and
heeded. Wherever it has, there you have
118 NEIGHBORS
seen the heart of man laid bare; and the
sight is good.
"'Way — down — yonder — in — the
— corn-field," brayed the band, and the
shrill chorus took up the words. At last
they meant something to them. It was
worth living in the day that taught that
lesson to the children of the tenements.
Other visions, new scenes, came trooping
by on the refrain : the farm-homes far
and near where they found, as the years
passed and the new love grew and warmed
the hearts, that they had entertained
angels unawares ; the host of boys and
girls, greater than would people a city,
that have gone out to take with the old
folks the place of the lads who would not
stay on the land, and have grown up sturdy
men and women, good citizens, governors
THE CITY'S HEART 119
of States some of them, cheating the slum
of its due; the floating hospitals that
carry their cargoes of white and helpless
little sufferers down the bay in the hot
summer days, and bring them back at
night sitting bolt upright at the supper-
table and hammering it with their spoons,
shouting for more; the new day that
shines through the windows of our school-
houses, dispelling the nightmare of dry-
as-dust pedagoguery, and plants brass-
bands upon the roof of the school, where
the children dance and are happy under
the stars ; that builds play-piers and neigh-
borhood parks in which never a sign *'Keep
off the Grass" shall stand to their un-
doing; that grows school-gardens in the
steps of the kindergarten, makes truck-
farmers on city lots of the toughs they
120 NEIGHBORS
would have bred, lying waste ; that strikes
the fetters of slavery from childhood in
home and workshop, and breaks the way
for a better to-morrow. Happy vision of
a happy day that came in with the tears
of little Mary Ellen. Truly they were
not shed in vain.
There was a pause in the play on the
pier. Then the strains of "America"
floated down to us where we stood.
"Long may our land be bright
With Freedom's holy light,"
came loud and clear in the childish voices.
They knew it by heart, and no wonder.
To their fathers, freedom was but an
empty name, a mockery. My friend stood
bareheaded till the last line was sung :
"Great God, our King!"
THE CITY'S HEART 121
then he put on his hat and nodded to me
to come. We walked away in silence.
To him, too, there had come in that hour
the vision of the heart of the great city;
and before it he was dumb.
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM
It is a good many years since I ran
across the Murphy family while hunt-
ing up a murder, in the old Mulberry
Street days. That was not their name,
but no matter; it was one just as good.
Their home was in Poverty Gap, and I
have seldom seen a worse. The man
was a wife-beater when drunk, which he
was whenever he had '*the price." Hard
work and hard knocks had made a wreck
of his wife. The five children, two of them
girls, were growing up as they could,
which was not as they should, but accord-
ing to the way of Poverty Gap : in the
gutter.
122
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 123
We took them and moved them across
town from the West Side to be nearer us,
for it was a case where to be neighbor one
had to stand close. As another step, I
had the man taken up and sent to the
Island. He came home the next week,
and before the sun set on another day
had run his family to earth. We found
one of the boys bringing beer in a can
and Mr. Murphy having a good time on
the money we had laid away against the
landlord's call. Mrs. Murphy was nurs-
ing a black eye at the sink. She had
done her best, but she was fighting against
fate.
So it seemed ; for as the years went by,
though he sometimes stayed out his month
on the Island — more often, especially if
near election time, he was back the next
124 NEIGHBORS
or even the same day — and though we
moved the family into every unlikely
neighborhood we could think of, always
he found them out and celebrated his
return home by beating his wife and chas-
ing the children out to buy beer, the girls,
as they grew up, to earn in the street the
money for his debauches. I had talked
the matter over with the Chief of Police,
who was interested on the human side,
and we had agreed that there was no other
way than to eliminate Mr. Murphy. All
benevolent schemes of reforming him were
preposterous. So, between us, we sent
him to jail nineteen times. He did not
always get there. Once he was back be-
fore he could have reached the Island
ferry; we never knew how. Another
time, when the doorman at the police
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 125
station was locking him up, he managed
to get on the free side of the door, and,
drunk as he was, slammed it on the police-
man and locked him in. Then he sat
down outside, lighted his pipe and cracked
jokes at the helpless anger of his prisoner.
Murphy was a humorist in his way. Had
he also been a poet he might have secured
his discharge as did his chum on the Island
who delivered himself thus in his own
defense before the police judge :
"Leaves have their time to fall.
And so likewise have I.
The reason, too, is the same.
It comes of getting dry.
The difference 'twixt leaves and me —
I fall more harder and more frequently."
But Murphy was no poet, and his sense
of humor was of a kind too fraught with
peril to life and limb. When he was
126 NEIGHBORS
arraigned the nineteenth time, the judge
in the Essex Market Court lost patience
when I tried to persuade him to break the
Island routine and hold the man for the
Special Sessions, and ordered me sternly
to "Stand down, sir ! This court is not
to be dictated to by anybody." I had to
remind his Honor that unless he could be
persuaded to deal rationally with Mr.
Murphy the court might yet come to be
charged before the Grand Jury with being
accessory to wife murder, for assuredly it
was coming to that. It helped, and Mur-
phy's case was considered in Sessions,
where a sentence of two years and a half
was imposed upon him. While serving
it he died.
The children had meanwhile grown into
young men and women. The first sum-
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 127
mer, when we sent the two girls to a cler-
gyman's family in the country, they stole
some rings and came near wrecking all
our plans. But those good people had
sense, and saw that the children stole as
a magpie steals — the gold looked good
to them. They kept them, and they have
since grown into good women. To be
sure, it was like a job of original creation.
They had to be built, morally and intel-
lectually, from the ground up. But in
the end we beat Poverty Gap. The boys ?
That was a harder fight, for the gutter
had its grip on them. But we pulled
them out. At all events, they did better
than their father. When they were
fifteen they wore neckties, which in itself
was a challenge to the traditions of the
Gap. I don't think I ever saw Mr. Mur-
128 NEIGHBORS
phy with one, or a collar either. They
will never be college professors, but they
promised fair to be honest workingmen,
which was much.
What to do with the mother was a sore
puzzle for a while. She could not hold a
flat-iron in her hand ; didn't know which
end came first. She could scrub, and we
began at that. With infinite patience,
she was taught washing and ironing, and
between visits from her rascal husband
began to make out well. For she was
industrious, and, with hope reviving, life
took on some dignity, inconceivable in
her old setting. In spite of all his cruelty
she never wholly cast off her husband.
He was still to her Mr. Murphy, the head
of the house, if by chance he were to be
caught out sober; but the chance never
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 129
befell. It was right that he should be
locked up, but outside of these official
relations of his, as it were, with society,
she had no criticism to make upon him.
Only once, when he dropped a note show-
ing that he had been carrying on a flirta-
tion with a "scrub" on the Island, did
she exhibit any resentment. Mrs. Murphy
was jealous ; that is, she was human.
Through all the years of his abuse, with
the instinct of her race, she had managed
to keep up an insurance on his life that
would give him a decent burial. And
when he lay dead at last she spent it all —
more than a hundred and fifty dollars —
on a wake over the fellow, all except a
small sum which she reserved for her own
adornment in his honor. She came over
to the Settlement to consult our head
130 NEIGHBORS
worker as to the proprieties of the thing:
should she wear mourning earrings in his
memory ?
Such is the plain record of the Murphy
family, one of the oldest on our books in
Henry Street. Over against it let me set
one of much more recent date, and let
them tell their own story.
Our gardener, when he came to dig up
from their winter bed by the back fence
the privet shrubs that grow on our roof
garden in summer, reported that one was
missing. It was not a great loss, and we
thought no more about it, till one day one
of our kindergarten workers came tip-
toeing in and beckoned us out on the roof.
Way down in the depth of the tenement-
house yard back of us, where the ice lay
in a grimy crust long after the spring
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 131
flowers had begun to peep out in our
garden above, grew our missing shrub.
A piece of ground, yard-wide, had been
cleared of rubbish and dug over. In the
middle of the plot stood the privet shrub,
trimmed to make it impersonate a young
tree. A fence had been built about it
with lath, and the whole thing had quite
a festive look) A little lad was watering
and tending the "garden." He looked
up and saw us and nodded with perfect
frankness. He was Italian, by the looks
of him)
One of our workers went around in
Madison Street to invite him to the Settle-
ment, where we would give him all the
flowers he wanted.
"But come by the front door, not over
the back fence," was the message she
132 NEIGHBORS
bore, and he said he would. He made
no bones of having raided our yard. He
wanted the "tree" and took it. But he
didn't come. It was a long way round ;
his was more direct. This spring the
same worker caught him climbing the
back fence once more, and this time try-
ing to drag back with him a whole win-
dow-box. She was just in time to pull it
back on our side. He let go his grip with-
out resentment. It was the fate of war;
that time we won. We renewed our
invitation after that, and, when he didn't
respond, sent him four blossoming gera-
niums with the friendly regards of a neigh-
bor who bore no grudge. For in our
social creed the longing for a flower in the
child-heart covers a maze of mischief ; and
a maze it is always with the boys. No
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 133
wonder we feel that way. Our work, all
of it, sprang from that longing and was
built upon it. But that is another story.
The other day I looked down and saw
our flowers blooming there, but with a
discouraged look I could make out even
from that height. Still no news from
their owner. A little girl with blue rib-
bons in her hair was watering them. I
went around and struck up an acquaintance
with her. Mike was in the country, she
said, on Long Island, where his sister was
married. She, too, was his sister. Her
name was Rose, and a sweet little rose she
did look like in all the litter of that tene-
ment yard. It was for her Mike had
made the garden and had built the summer-
house which she and her friends furnished.
She took me to it, in the corner of the
134 NEIGHBORS
garden. You could just put your head
in; but it was worth while. The walls,
made of old boxes and boards, had been
papered with colored supplements. The
*'Last Supper" was there, and some bird
pictures, a snipe and a wood-duck with a
wholesome suggestion of outdoors; on a
nicely papered shelf some shining bits of
broken crockery to finish things off. A
doll's bed and chair furnished one-half
of the "house," a wobbly parlor chair the
other half. The initials of the four girl
friends were written in blue chalk over
the door.
The "garden" was one step across, two
the long way. I saw at a glance why the
geraniums drooped, with leaves turning yel-
low. She had taken them out of the pots
and set them right on top of the ground.
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 135
"But that isn't the way," I said, and
rolled up my sleeves to show her how to
plant a flower. I shall not soon get the
smell of that sour soil out of my nostrils
and my memory. It welled up with a
thousand foul imaginings of the gutter
the minute I dug into it with the lath she
gave me for a spade. Inwardly I re-
solved that before summer came again
there should be a barrel of the sweet whole-
some earth from my own Long Island
garden in that back yard, in which a rose-
bush might live. But the sun ?
"Does it ever come here.'^" I asked,
doubtfully glancing up at the frowning
walls that hedged us in.
"Every evening it comes for a little
while," she said cheerfully. It must be a
little while indeed, in that den. She
136 NEIGHBORS
showed me a straggling green thing with
no leaves. *'That is a potato," she said,
*'and this is a bean. That's the way
they grow." The bean was trying feebly
to climb a string to the waste-pipe that
crossed the "garden" and burrowed in it.
Between the shell-paved walk and the wall
was a border two hands wide where there
was nothing.
"There used to be grass there," she
said, "but the cats ate it." On the wall
above it was chalked the inevitable "Keep
off the Grass." They had done their
best.
Three or four plants with no tradi-
tional prejudices as to soil grew in one
corner. "Mike found the seed of them,"
she said simply. I glanced at the back
fence and guessed where.
CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM 137
She was carrying water from the
hydrant when I went out. "They're
good people," said the old housekeeper,
who had come out to see what the strange
man was there for. On the stoop sat an
old grandfather with a child in his lap.
"It is the way of 'em," he said. "I
asked this one," patting the child affec-
tionately, "what she wanted for her birth-
day. 'Gran 'pa,' she said, *I want a flower.'
Now did ye ever hear such a dern little
fool.'*" and he smoothed her tangled head.
But I saw that he understood.
Chips from the maelstrom that swirls
ever in our great city. We stand on the
shore and pull in such wrecks as we may.
I set them down here without comment,
without theory. For it is not theory that
in the last going over we are brothers,
138 NEIGHBORS
being children of one Father. Hence our
real heredity is this, that we are children
of God. Hence, also, our fight upon the
environment that would smother instincts
proclaiming our birthright is the great
human issue, the real fight for freedom,
in all days.
And Murphy, says my carping friend,
where does he come in ? He does not
come in; unless it be that the love and
loyalty of his wife which not all his cruelty
could destroy, and the inhumanity of
Poverty Gap, plead for him that another
chance may be given the man in him.
Who knows ?
HEARTSEASE
In a mean street, over on the West Side,
I came across a doorway that bore upon
its plate the word "Heartsease." The
house was as mean as the street. It was
flanked on one side by a jail, on the other
by a big stable barrack. In front, right
under the windows, ran the elevated
trains, so close that to open the windows
was impossible, for the noise and dirt.
Back of it they were putting up a build-
ing which, when completed, would hug
the rear wall so that you couldn't open
the windows there at all.
After nightfall you would have found in
that house two frail little women. One
139
140 NEIGHBORS
of them taught school by day in the out-
lying districts of the city, miles and miles
away, across the East River. By night
she came there to sleep, and to be near her
neighbors.
And who were these neighbors ?
Drunken, dissolute women, vile brothels
and viler saloons, for the saloon trafficked
in the vice of the other. Those who lived
there were Northfield graduates, girls of
refinement and modesty. Yet these were
the neighbors they had chosen for their
own. At all hours of the night the bell
would ring, and they would come, some-
times attended by policemen. Said one
of these :
"We have this case. She isn't wanted
in this home, or in that institution. She
doesn't come under their rules. We
HEARTSEASE 141
thought you might stretch yours to take
her in. Else she goes straight to the devil."
Yes ! that was what he said. And she :
"Bless you; we have no rules. Let her
come in." And she took her and put her
to bed.
In the midnight hour my friend of
Heartsease hears of a young girl, evi-
dently a new-comer, whom the brothel or
the saloon has in its clutch, and she gets
out of bed, and, going after her, demands
her sister^ and gets her out from the very
jaws of hell. Again, on a winter's night,
a drunken woman finds her way to her
door — a married woman with a husband
and children. And she gets out of her
warm bed again, and, when the other is
herself, takes her home, never leaving
her till she is safe.
142 NEIGHBORS
I found her papering the walls and paint-
ing the floor in her room. I said to her
that I did not think you could do anything
with those women, — and neither can you,
if they are just "those women" to you.
Jesus could. One came and sat at his
feet and wept, and dried them with her
hair.
"Oh," said she, "it isn't so! They
come, and are glad to stay. I don't know
that they are finally saved, that they never
fall again. But here, anyhow, we have
given them a resting spell and time to
think. And plenty turn good."
She told me of a girl brought in by her
brother as incorrigible. No one knew
what to do with her. She stayed in that
atmosphere of affection three months, and
went forth to service. That was nearly
HEARTSEASE 143
half a year before, and she had "stayed
good." A chorus girl lived twelve years
with a man, who then cast her off. Hearts-
ease sent her out a domestic, at ten dollars
a month, and she, too, "stayed good."
"I don't consider," said the woman
of Heartsease, simply, "that we are doing
it right, but we will yet."
I looked at her, the frail girl with this
unshaken, unshakable faith in the right,
and asked her, not where she got her
faith — I knew that — but where she got
the money to run the house. Alas, for
poor human nature that will not accept
the promise that "all these things shall be
added unto you !" She laughed.
"The rent is pledged by half a dozen
friends. The rest — comes."
"But how?"
144 NEIGHBORS
She pointed to a lot of circulars, pain-
fully written out in the night watches.
"We are selling soap just now," she
said; "but it is not always soap. Here,"
patting a chair, "this is Larkin's soap;
that chafing-dish is green stamps; this
set of dishes is Mother's Oats. We write
to the people, you see, and they buy the
things, and we get the prizes. We've
furnished the house in that way. And
some give us money. A man offered to
give an entertainment, promising to give
us $450 of the receipts. And then the
Charity Organization Society warned us
against him, and we had to give up the
$450," with a sigh. But she brightened
up in a moment: "The very next day we
got $1000 for our building fund. We
shall have to move some day."
HEARTSEASE 145
The elevated train swept by the window
with rattle and roar. You could have
touched it, so close did it run. "I won't
let it worry me," she said, with her brave
little smile.
I listened to the crash of the vanishing
train, and looked at the mean surround-
ings, and my thoughts wandered to the
great school in the Massachusetts hills
— her school — which I had passed only
the day before. It lay there beautiful
in the spring sunlight. But something
better than its sunlight and its green
hills had come down here to bear witness
to the faith which the founder of North-
field preached all his life, — this woman
who was a neighbor.
I forgot to ask in what special church
fold she belonged. It didn't seem to
146 NEIGHBORS
matter. I know that my friend, Sister
Irene, who picked the outcast waifs from
the gutter where they perished till she
came, was a Roman Catholic, and that
they both had sat at the feet of Him who
is all compassion, and had learned the
answer there to the question that awaits
us at the end of our journey :
"'I showed men God,' my Lord will say,
*As I traveled along the King's highway.
I eased the sister's troubled mind ;
I helped the blighted to be resigned ;
I showed the sky to the souls grown blind.
And what did you ? ' my Lord will say,
When we meet at the end of the King's highway."
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT
"The prisoner will stand," droned out
the clerk in the Court of General Sessions.
"Filippo Portoghese, you are convicted
of assault with intent to kill. Have you
anything to say why sentence should not
be passed upon you ?"
A sallow man with a hopeless look in
his heavy eyes rose slowly in his seat and
stood facing the judge. There was a pause
in the hum and bustle of the court as men
turned to watch the prisoner. He did not
look like a man who would take a neigh-
bor's life, and yet so nearly had he done
so, of set purpose it had been abundantly
proved, that his victim would carry the
147
148 NEIGHBORS
disfiguring scar of the bullet to the end
of his life, and only by what seemed an
almost miraculous chance had escaped
death. The story as told by witnesses
and substantially uncontradicted was this :
Portoghese and Vito Ammella, whom
he shot, were neighbors under the same
roof. Ammella kept the grocery on the
ground floor. Portoghese lived upstairs
in the tenement. He was a prosperous,
peaceful man, with a family of bright chil-
dren, with whom he romped and played
happily when home from his barber shop.
The Black Hand fixed its evil eye upon
the family group and saw its chance.
One day a letter came demanding a thou-
sand dollars. Portoghese put it aside with
the comment that this was New York,
not Italy. Other letters followed, threat-
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT 149
ening harm to his children. Portoghese
paid no attention, but his wife worried.
One day the baby, little Vito, was missing,
and in hysterics she ran to her husband's
shop crying that the Black Hand had
stolen the child.
The barber hurried home and sought
high and low. At last he came upon the
child sitting on Ammella's doorstep ; he
had wandered away and brought up at
the grocery; asked where he had been,
the child pointed to the store. Porto-
ghese flew in and demanded to know what
Ammella was doing with his boy. The
grocer was in a bad humor, and swore
at him. There was an altercation, and
Ammella attacked the barber with a broom,
beating him and driving him away from
his door. Black with anger, Portoghese
150 NEIGHBORS
ran to his room and returned with a
revolver. In the fight that followed he
shot Ammella through the head.
He was arrested and thrown into jail.
In the hospital the grocer hovered between
life and death for many weeks. Portoghese
lay in the Tombs awaiting trial for more
than a year, believing still that he was the
victim of a Black Hand conspiracy. When
at last the trial came on, his savings were
all gone, and of the once prosperous and
happy man only a shadow was left. He sat
in the court-room and listened in moody
silence to the witnesses who told how he had
unjustly suspected and nearly murdered his
friend. He was speedily convicted, and the
day of his sentence was fixed for Christmas
Eve. It was certain that it would go hard
with him. The Italians were too prone to
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT 151
shoot and stab, said the newspapers, and
the judges were showing no mercy.
The witnesses had told the truth, but
there were some things they did not know
and that did not get into the evidence.
The prisoner's wife was ill from grief and
want; their savings of years gone to
lawyer's fees, they were on the verge of
starvation. The children were hungry.
With the bells ringing in the glad holiday,
they were facing bitter homelessness in the
winter streets, for the rent was in arrears and
the landlord would not wait. And *'Papa"
away now for the second Christmas, and
maybe for many yet to come ! Ten, the
lawyer and jury had said : this was New
York, not Italy. In the Tombs the prisoner
said it over to himself, bitterly. He had
thought only of defending his own.
152 NEIGHBORS
So now he stood looking the judge and
the jury in the face, yet hardly seeing them.
He saw only the prison gates opening for
him, and the gray walls shutting him out
from his wife and little ones for — how
many Christmases was it ? One, two,
three — he fell to counting them over
mentally and did not hear when his lawyer
whispered and nudged him with his elbow.
The clerk repeated his question, but he
merely shook his head. What should he
have to say ? Had he not said it to these
men and they did not believe him ? About
little Vito who was lost, and his wife who
cried her eyes out because of the Black
Hand letters. He —
There was a step behind him, and a
voice he knew spoke. It was the voice of
Ammella, his neighbor, with whom he
' PLKASE, YOL U HONOR, LET THIS MAN GO ! IT IS CHRISTMAS."
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT 153
used to be friends before — before that
day.
*' Please, your Honor, let this man go !
It is Christmas, and we should have no
unkind thoughts. I have none against
Filippo here, and I ask you to let him go."
It grew very still in the court-room as
he spoke and paused for an answer. Law-
yers looked up from their briefs in aston-
ishment. The jurymen in the box leaned
forward and regarded the convicted man
and his victim with rapt attention. Such a
plea had not been heard in that place before.
Portoghese stood mute ; the voice sounded
strange and far away to him. He felt a
hand upon his shoulder that was the hand
of a friend, and shifted his feet uncertainly,
but made no response. The gray-haired
judge regarded the two gravely but kindly.
154 NEIGHBORS
"Your wish comes from a kind heart,"
he said. *'But this man has been con-
victed. The law must be obeyed. There
is nothing in it that allows us to let a guilty
man go free."
The jurymen whispered together and
one of them arose.
"Your Honor," he said, "a higher law
than any made by man came into the world
at Christmas — that we love one another.
These men would obey it. Will you not
let them ? The jury pray as one man
that you let mercy go before justice on
this Holy Eve."
A smile lit up Judge O'Sullivan's face.
"Filippo Portoghese," he said, "you are
a very fortunate man. The law bids me
send you to prison for ten years, and but
for a miraculous chance would have con-
HIS CHRISTMAS GIFT 155
demned you to death. But the man you
maimed for life pleads for you, and the
jury that convicted you begs that you
go free. The Court remembers what you
have suffered and it knows the pHght of
your family, upon whom the heaviest
burden of your punishment would fall.
Go, then, to your home. And to you,
gentlemen, a happy holiday such as you
have given him and his ! This court stands
adjourned."
The voice of the crier was lost in a storm
of applause. The jury rose to their feet
and cheered judge, complainant, and de-
fendant. Portoghese, who had stood as
one dazed, raised eyes that brimmed with
tears to the bench and to his old neighbor.
He understood at last. Ammella threw
his arm around him and kissed him on
156 NEIGHBORS
both cheeks, his disfigured face beaming
with joy. One of the jurymen, a Jew, put
his hand impulsively in his pocket, emptied
it into his hat, and passed the hat to his
neighbor. All the others followed his ex-
ample. The court oflScer dropped in half
a dollar as he stuffed its contents into the
happy Italian's pocket. "For little Vito,"
he said, and shook his hand.
"Ah !" said the foreman of the jury,
looking after the reunited friends leaving
the court-room arm in arm; "it is good
to live in New York. A merry Christmas
to you, Judge ! "
OUR ROOF GARDEN AMONG THE
TENEMENTS
A YEAR has gone since we built a roof
garden on top of the gymnasium that
took away our children's playground by
filling up the yard. In many ways it has
been the hardest of all the years we have
lived through with our poor neighbors.
Poverty, illness, misrepresentation, and the
hottest and hardest of all summers for
those who must live in the city's crowds —
they have all borne their share. But to
the blackest cloud there is somewhere a
silver lining if you look long enough and
hard enough for it, and ours has been that
roof garden. It is not a very great affair
157
158 NEIGHBORS
— some of you readers would smile at it,
I suppose. There are no palm trees and
no "pergola," just a plain roof down in a
kind of well with tall tenements all about.
Two big barrels close to the wall tell their
own story of how the world is growing
up toward the light. For they once held
whisky and trouble and deviltry ; now
they are filled with fresh, sweet earth, and
beautiful Japanese ivy grows out of them
and clings lovingly to the wall of our house,
spreading its soft, green tendrils farther
and farther each season, undismayed by the
winter's cold. And then boxes and boxes
on a brick parapet, with hardy Golden
Glow, scarlet geraniums, California privet,
and even a venturesome Crimson Rambler.
When first we got window boxes and
filled them with the ivy that looks so
OUR ROOF GARDEN 159
pretty and is seen so far, every child in the
block accepted it as an invitation to help
himself when and how he could. They
never touch it nowadays. They like it
too much. We didn't have to tell them.
They do it themselves. When this summer
it became necessary on account of the
crowd to eliminate the husky boys from
the roof garden and we gave them the
gym instead to romp in, they insisted on
paying their way. Free on the roof was
one thing; this was quite another. They
taxed themselves two cents a week, one
for the house, one for the club treasury,
and they passed this resolution that *'any
boy wot shoots craps or swears, or makes
a row in the house or is disrespectful to
Mr. Smith or runs with any crooks, is
put out of the club." They were persuaded
160 NEIGHBORS
to fine the offender a cent instead of ex-
pelling him, and it worked all right except
with Sammy, who arose to dispute the
equity of it all and to demand the organiza-
tion of a club "where they don't put a
feller out fer shootin' craps — wot's craps ! **
But I was telling of the roof garden and
what happened there. It was in the long
vacation when it is open from early morn-
ing until all the little ones in the neighbor-
hood are asleep and the house closes its
doors. All through the day the children
own the garden and carry on their play
there. One evening each week our girls'
club have an "at home" on the roof, and
on three nights the boys bring their friends
and smoke and talk. Wednesday and
Friday are mothers' and children's nights.
That was when they began it. The little
OUR ROOF GARDEN 161
ones had been telling stories of Cinderella
and Red Riding Hood and Beauty and
the Beast and Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm, and before they themselves realized
that they were doing it, they were acting
them. The dramatic instinct is strong
in these children. The "princess" of the
fairy tales appeals irresistibly, Cinderella
even more. The triumph of good over
evil is rapturously applauded ; the villain
has to look out for himself — and indeed,
he had better ! Don't I know ? Have I
forgotten the time they put me out of the
theater in Copenhagen for shrieking
"Murder! Police!" when the rascal
lover — nice lover, he ! — was on the
very point of plunging a gleaming knife
into the heart of the beautiful maiden
who slept in an armchair, unconscious
162 NEIGHBORS
of her peril. And I was sixteen; these
are eight, or nine.
So the prince rode off with Cinderella
in front of him on a fiery kindergarten
chair, and the wicked sisters were left to
turn green with envy ; and another prince
with black cotton mustache, on an even
more impetuous charger, a tuft of tissue
paper in his cap for a feather, galloped up
to release Beauty with a kiss from her
century of sleep; and Beauty awoke as
naturally as if she had but just closed her
eyes, amid volleys of applause from the
roof and from the tenements, every win-
dow in which was a reserved seat.
Next the Bad Wolf strode into the ring,
with honeyed speech to beguile little Red
Riding Hood. The plays had rapidly be-
come so popular that a regular ring had
OUR ROOF GARDEN 163
to be made on the roof for a stage. When
the seats gave out, chalk lines took their
place and the children and their mothers
sat on them with all the gravity befitting
the dress-circle. Red Riding Hood having
happily escaped being eaten alive, Rebecca
rode by with cheery smile and pink parasol,
as full of sunshine as the brook on her
home farm. The children shouted their
delight.
"Where do you get it all?" asked one
who did not know of our dog-eared library
they grew up with before the Carnegie
branch came and we put ours in the attic.
"We know the story — all we have to
do is to act it," was the children's reply.
And act it they did, until the report went
abroad that at the Riis House there was
a prime show every Wednesday and Friday
164 NEIGHBORS
night. That was when the schools re-
opened and the recreation center at No. 1
in the next block was closed. Then its
crowds came and besieged our house until
the street was jammed and traffic impossi-
ble. For the first and only time in its
history a policeman had to be placed on
the stoop, or we should have been swamped
past hope. But he is gone long ago.
Don't let him deter you from calling.
The nights are cold now, and Cinderella
rides no more on the prancing steed of her
fairy prince. The children's songs have
ceased. Beauty and the Beast are tucked
away with the ivy and the bulbs and the
green shrubs against the bright sunny
days that are coming. The wolf is a bad
memory, and the tenement windows that
were filled with laughing faces are vacant
OUR ROOF GARDEN 165
and shut. But many a child smiles in its
sleep, dreaming of the happy hours in our
roof garden, and many a mother's heavy
burden was lightened because of it and
because of the children's joy. The garden
was an afterthought — we had taken their
playground in the yard, and there was the
wide roof. It seemed as though it ought
to be put to use. They said flowers
wouldn't grow down in that hole, and that
the neighbors would throw things, and any-
way the children would despoil them. Well,
they did grow, never better, and the whole
block grew up to them. Their message
went into every tenement house home.
Not the crabbedest old bachelor ever threw
anything on our roof to disgrace it; and
as for the children, they loved the flowers.
That tells it all. The stone we made light
166 NEIGHBORS
of proved the cornerstone of the build-
ing. There is nothing in our house, full
as it is of a hundred activities to bring
sweetening touch to weary lives, that has
half the cheer in it which our roof garden
holds in summer, nothing that has ten-
derer memories for us all the year round.
That is the story of the flowers in one
garden as big as the average back yard,
and of the girls who took them to their
hearts. For, of course, it was the girls
who did it. The boys — well ! boys are
boys in Henry Street as on Madison Avenue.
Perhaps on ours there is a trifle less veneer-
ing. They had a party to end up with,
and ice-cream, lots of it. But as the
mothers couldn't come, it being wash-
day or something, and they didn't want
their sisters — they were hardly old enough
OUR ROOF GARDEN 167
to see the advantage of swapping them
over — they had to eat it themselves, all
of it. I am not even sure they didn't
plan it so. The one redeeming feature
was that they treated the workers liber-
ally first. Else they might have died of
indigestion. Whether they planned that,
too, I wonder.
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS
"All aboard for Coney Island!" The
gates of the bridge train slammed, the
whistle shrieked, and the cars rolled out
past rows of houses that grew smaller
and lower to Jim's wondering eyes, until
they quite disappeared beneath the track.
He felt himself launching forth above
the world of men, and presently he saw,
deep down below, the broad stream with
ships and ferry-boats and craft going dif-
ferent ways, just like the tracks and traflSc
in a big, wide street; only so far away
was it all that the pennant on the top-
mast of a vessel passing directly under the
train seemed as if it did not belong to his
168
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 169
world at all. Jim followed the white foam
in the wake of the sloop with fascinated
stare, until a puffing tug bustled across
its track and wiped it out. Then he
settled back in his seat with a sigh that
had been pent up within him twenty long,
wondering minutes since he limped down
the Subway at Twenty-third Street. It
was his first journey abroad.
Jim had never been to the Brooklyn
Bridge before. It is doubtful if he had
ever heard of it. If he had, it was as of
something so distant, so unreal, as to have
been quite within the realm of fairyland,
had his life experience included fairies.
It had not. Jim's frail craft had been
launched in Little Italy, half a dozen
miles or more up -town, and there it had
been moored, its rovings being limited
170 NEIGHBORS
at the outset by babyhood and the tene-
ment, and later on by the wreck that had
made of him a castaway for life. A mys-
terious something had attacked one of
Jim's ankles, and, despite ointments and
lotions prescribed by the wise women of
the tenement, had eaten into the bone
and stayed there. At nine the lad was a
cripple with one leg shorter than the other
by two or three inches, with a stepmother,
a squalling baby to mind for his daily
task, hard words and kicks for his wage;
for Jim was an unprofitable investment,
promising no returns, but, rather, constant
worry and outlay. The outlook was not
the most cheering in the world.
But, happily, Jim was little concerned
about things to come. He lived in the
day that is, fighting his way as he could
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 171
with a leg and a half and a nickname, —
"Gimpy" they called him for his limp,
— and getting out of it what a fellow so
handicapped could. After all, there were
compensations. When the gang scattered
before the cop, it did not occur to him to
lay any of the blame to Gimpy, though
the little lad with the pinched face and
sharp eyes had, in fact, done scouting
duty most craftily. It was partly in
acknowledgment of such services, partly
as a concession to his sharper wits, that
Gimpy was tacitly allowed a seat in the
councils of the Cave Gang, though in the
far "kid" corner. He limped through
their campaigns with them, learned to
swim by "dropping off the dock" at the
end of the street into the swirling tide, and
once nearly lost his life when one of the
172 NEIGHBORS
bigger boys dared him to run through an
election bonfire like his able-bodied com-
rades. Gimpy started to do it at once,
but stumbled and fell, and was all but
burned to death before the other boys
could pull him out. This act of bravado
earned him full membership in the gang,
despite his tender years ; and, indeed, it
is doubtful if in all that region there was
a lad of his age as tough and loveless as
Gimpy. The one affection of his barren
life was the baby that made it slavery by
day. But, somehow, there was that in
its chubby foot groping for him in its
baby sleep, or in the little round head
pillowed on his shoulder, that more than
made up for it all.
Ill luck was surely Gimpy 's portion. It
was not a month after he had returned
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 173
to the haunts of the gang, a battle-scarred
veteran now since his encounter with the
bonfire, when "the Society's" officers held
up the huckster's wagon from which he
was crying potatoes with his thin, shrill
voice, which somehow seemed to convey
the note of pain that was the prevailing
strain of his life. They made Gimpy a
prisoner, limp, stick, and all. The in-
quiry that ensued as to his years and home
setting, the while Gimpy was undergoing
the incredible experience of being washed
and fed regularly three times a day, set
in motion the train of events that was at
present hurrying him toward Coney Island
in midwinter, with a snow-storm draping
the land in white far and near, as the train
sped seaward. He gasped as he reviewed
the hurrying events of the week : the visit
174 NEIGHBORS
of the doctor from Sea Breeze, who had
scrutinized his ankle as if he expected to
find some of the swag of the last raid hid-
den somewhere about it. Gimpy never
took his eyes off him during the examina-
tion. No word or cry escaped him when
it hurt most, but his bright, furtive eyes
never left the doctor or lost one of his
movements. *'Just like a weasel caught
in a trap," said the doctor, speaking of his
charge afterward.
But when it was over, he clapped Gimpy
on the shoulder and said it was all right.
He was sure he could help.
"Have him at the Subway to-morrow at
twelve," was his parting direction; and
Gimpy had gone to bed to dream that he
was being dragged down the stone stairs
by three helmeted men, to be fed to a
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 175
monster breathing fire and smoke at the
foot of the stairs.
Now his wondering journey was dis-
turbed by a cheery voice beside him.
"Well, bub, ever see that before.'^" and
the doctor pointed to the gray ocean line
dead ahead. Gimpy had not seen it, but
he knew well enough what it was.
"It's the river," he said, "that I cross
when I go to Italy."
"Right !" and his companion held out
a helping hand as the train pulled up at
the end of the journey. "Now let's see
how we can navigate."
And, indeed, there was need of seeing
about it. Right from the step of the
train the snow lay deep, a pathless waste
burying street and sidewalk out of sight,
blocking the closed and barred gate of
176 NEIGHBORS
Dreamland, of radiant summer memory,
and stalling the myriad hobby-horses of
shows that slept their long winter sleep.
Not a whinny came on the sharp salt
breeze. The strident voice of the car-
penter's saw and the rat-tat-tat of his
hammer alone bore witness that there
was life somewhere in the white desert.
The doctor looked in dismay at Gimpy's
brace and high shoe, and shook his head.
"He never can do it. Hello, there !"
An express wagon had come into view
around the corner of the shed. "Here's
a job for you." And before he could have
said Jack Robinson, Gimpy felt himself
hoisted bodily into the wagon and de-
posited there like any express package.
From somewhere a longish something that
proved to be a Christmas-tree, very much
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 177
wrapped and swathed about, came to keep
him company. The doctor climbed up by
the driver, and they were off. Gimpy re-
called with a dull sense of impending
events in which for once he had no shap-
ing hand, as he rubbed his ears where the
bitter blast pinched, that to-morrow was
Christmas.
A strange group was that which gathered
about the supper-table at Sea Breeze that
night. It would have been sufficiently
odd to any one anywhere ; but to Gimpy,
washed, in clean, comfortable raiment,
with his bad foot set in a firm bandage,
and for once no longer sore with the pain
that had racked his frame from baby-
hood, it seemed so unreal that once or
twice he pinched himself covertly to see
if he were really awake. They came weakly
178 NEIGHBORS
stumping with sticks and crutches and on
club feet, the lame and the halt, the chil-
dren of sorrow and suffering from the city
slums, and stood leaning on crutch or
chair for support while they sang their
simple grace; but neither in their clear
childish voices nor yet in the faces that
were turned toward Gimpy in friendly
scrutiny as the last comer, was there
trace of pain. Their cheeks were ruddy
and their eyes bright with the health of
outdoors, and when they sang about the
"Frog in the Pond," in response to a
spontaneous demand, laughter bubbled
over around the table. Gimpy, sizing his
fellow-boarders up according to the stand-
ards of the gang, with the mental con-
clusion that he "could lick the bunch,"
felt a warm little hand worming its way
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 179
into his, and, looking into a pair of trustful
baby eyes, choked with a sudden reminis-
cent pang, but smiled back at his friend
and felt suddenly at home. Little Ellen,
with the pervading affections, had added
him to her famiPy of brothers. What
honors were in store for him in that rela-
tion Gimpy never guessed. Ellen left no
one out. When summer came again she
enlarged the family further by adopting
the President of the United States as her
papa, when he came visiting to Sea Breeze ;
and by rights Gimpy should have achieved
a pull such as would have turned the boss
of his ward green with envy.
It appeared speedily that something
unusual was on foot. There was a sub-
dued excitement among the children which
his experience diagnosed at first flush as
180 NEIGHBORS
the symptoms of a raid. But the fact
that in all the waste of snow on the way
over he had seen nothing rising to the
apparent dignity of candy-shop or grocery-
store made him dismiss the notion as
untenable. Presently unfamiliar doings
developed. The children who could write
scribbled notes on odd sheets of paper,
which the nurses burned in the fireplace
with solemn incantations. Something in
the locked dining-room was an object of
pointed interest. Things were going on
there, and expeditions to penetrate the
mystery were organized at brief inter-
vals, and as often headed off by watchful
nurses.
When, finally, the children were gotten
upstairs and undressed, from the head-
post of each of thirty-six beds there swung
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 181
a little stocking, limp and yawning with
mute appeal. Gimpy had "caught on"
by this time : it was a wishing-bee, and
old Santa Claus was supposed to jBlI the
stockings with what each had most
desired. The consultation over, baby
George had let him into the game. Baby
George did not know enough to do his
own wishing, and the thirty-five took it
in hand while he was being put to bed.
"Let's wish for some little dresses for
him," said big Mariano, who was the
baby's champion and court of last resort;
"that's what he needs." And it was done.
Gimpy smiled a little disdainfully at the
credulity of the "kids." The Santa Claus
fake was out of date a long while in his
tenement. But he voted for baby George's
dresses, all the same, and even went to
182 NEIGHBORS
the length of recording his own wish for
a good baseball bat. Gimpy was coming
on.
Going to bed in that queer place fairly
"stumped" Gimpy. "Peelin"' had been
the simplest of processes in Little Italy.
Here they pulled a fellow's clothes off
only to put on another lot, heavier every
way, with sweater and hood and flannel
socks and mittens to boot, as if the boy
were bound for a tussle with the storm
outside rather than for his own warm bed.
And so, in fact, he was. For no sooner
had he been tucked under the blankets,
warm and snug, than the nurses threw
open all the windows, every one, and let
the gale from without surge in and through
as it listed ; and so they left them. Gimpy
shivered as he felt the frosty breath of
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 183
the ocean nipping his nose, and crept
under the blanket for shelter. But pres-
ently he looked up and saw the other
boys snoozing happily like so many little
Eskimos equipped for the North Pole,
and decided to keep them company. For
a while he lay thinking of the strange
things that had happened that day, since
his descent into the Subway. If the gang
could see him now. But it seemed far
away, with all his past life — farther than
the river with the ships deep down below.
Out there upon the dark waters, in the
storm, were they sailing now, and all the
lights of the city swallowed up in gloom ?
Presently he heard through it all the
train roaring far off in the Subway and
many hurrying feet on the stairs. The
iron gates clanked — and he fell asleep
184 NEIGHBORS
with the song of the sea for his hillaby.
Mother Nature had gathered her child
to her bosom, and the slum had lost in
the battle for a life.
The clock had not struck two when
from the biggest boy's bed in the corner
there came in a clear, strong alto the
strains of "Ring, ring, happy bells !" and
from every room childish voices chimed
in. The nurses hurried to stop the chorus
with the message that it was yet five
hours to daylight. They were up, trim-
ming the tree in the dining-room; at the
last moment the crushing announcement
had been made that the candy had been
forgotten, and a midnight expedition had
set out for the city through the storm to
procure it. A semblance of order was
restored, but cat naps ruled after that,
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 185
till, at daybreak, a gleeful shout from
Ellen's bed proclaimed that Santa Claus
had been there, in very truth, and had
left a dolly in her stocking. It was the
signal for such an uproar as had not been
heard on that beach since Port Arthur fell
for the last time upon its defenders three
months before. From thirty-six stockings
came forth a veritable army of tops, balls,
wooden animals of unknown pedigree,
oranges, music-boxes, and cunning little
pocket-books, each with a shining silver
quarter in, love-tokens of one in the great
city whose heart must have been light
with happy dreams in that hour. Gimpy
drew forth from his stocking a very able-
bodied baseball bat and considered it
with a stunned look. Santa Claus was a
fake, but the bat — there was no denying
186 NEIGHBORS
that, and he had wished for one the very
last thing before he fell asleep !
Daylight struggled still with a heavy
snow-squall when the signal was given
for the carol "Christmas time has come
again," and the march down to breakfast.
That march ! On the third step the carol
was forgotten and the band broke into one
long cheer that was kept up till the door
of the dining-room was reached. At the
first glimpse within, baby George's wail
rose loud and grievous: "My chair! my
chair!" But it died in a shriek of joy as
he saw what it was that had taken its
place. There stood the Christmas-tree,
one mass of shining candles, and silver
and gold, and angels with wings, and
wondrous things of colored paper all over
it from top to bottom. Gimpy's eyes
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 187
sparkled at the sight, skeptic though he
was at nine ; and in the depths of his soul
he came over, then and there, to Santa
Claus, to abide forever — only he did not
know it yet.
To make the children eat any breakfast,
with three gay sleds waiting to take the
girls out in the snow, was no easy matter;
but it was done at last, and they swarmed
forth for a holiday in the open. All days
are spent in the open at Sea Breeze, — even
the school is a tent, — and very cold weather
only shortens the brief school hour; but
this day was to be given over to play
altogether. Winter it was "for fair," but
never was coasting enjoyed on New Eng-
land hills as these sledding journeys on
the sands where the surf beat in with crash
of thunder. The sea itself had joined in
188 NEIGHBORS
making Christmas for its little friends.
The day before, a regiment of crabs had
come ashore and surrendered to the cook
at Sea Breeze. Christmas morn found
the children's "floor" — they called the
stretch of clean, hard sand between high-
water mark and the surf -line by that name
— filled with gorgeous shells and pebbles,
and strange fishes left there by the tide
overnight. The fair-weather friends who
turn their backs upon old ocean with the
first rude blasts of autumn little know
what wonderful surprises it keeps for those
who stand by it in good and in evil report.
When the very biggest turkey that ever
strutted in barnyard was discovered steam-
ing in the middle of the dinner-table and
the report went round in whispers that
ice-cream had been seen carried in in pails,
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 189
and when, in response to a pull at, the
bell. Matron Thomsen ushered in a squad
of smiling mamas and papas to help eat
the dinner, even Gimpy gave in to the
general joy, and avowed that Christmas
was "bully." Perhaps his acceptance of
the fact was made easier by a hasty survey
of the group of papas and mamas, which
assured him that his own were not among
them. A fleeting glimpse of the baby,
deserted and disconsolate, brought the old
pucker to his brow for a passing moment;
but just then big Fred set off a snapper
at his very ear, and thrusting a pea-green
fool's-cap upon his head, pushed him into
the roistering procession that hobbled round
and round the table, cheering fit to burst.
And the babies that had been brought
down from their cribs, strapped, because
190 NEIGHBORS
their backs were crooked, in the frames
that look so cruel and are so kind, lifted
up their feeble voices as they watched
the show with shining eyes. Little baby
Helen, who could only smile and wave
*'by-by" with one fat hand, piped in with
her tiny voice, "Here I is !" It was all
she knew, and she gave that with a right
good will, which is as much as one can ask
of anybody, even of a snow baby.
If there were still lacking a last link to
rivet Gimpy's loyalty to his new home
for good and all, he himself supplied it
when the band gathered under the leafless
trees — for Sea Breeze has a grove in
summer, the only one on the island —
and whiled away the afternoon making
a "park" in the snow, with sea-shells
for curbing and boundary stones. When
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 191
it was all but completed, Gimpy, with an
inspiration that then and there installed
him leader, gave it the finishing touch by
drawing a policeman on the corner with a
club, and a sign, "Keep off the grass."
Together they gave it the air of reality
and the true local color that made them
feel, one and all, that now indeed they
were at home.
Toward evening a snow-storm blew in
from the sea, but instead of scurrying for
shelter, the little Eskimos joined the doctor
in hauling wood for a big bonfire on the
beach. There, while the surf beat upon
the shore hardly a dozen steps away,
and the storm whirled the snow-clouds in
weird drifts over sea and land, they drew
near the fire, and heard the doctor tell
stories that seemed to come right out of
192 NEIGHBORS
the darkness and grow real while they
listened. Dr. Wallace is a Southerner and
lived his childhood with Br'er Rabbit and
Mr. Fox, and they saw them plainly gam-
boling in the firelight as the story went
on. For the doctor knows boys and loves
them, that is how.
No one would have guessed that they
were cripples, every one of that rugged
band that sat down around the Christmas
supper-table, rosy-cheeked and jolly —
cripples condemned, but for Sea Breeze,
to lives of misery and pain, most of them
to an early death and suffering to others.
For their enemy was that foe of mankind,
the White Plague, that for thousands of
years has taken tithe and toll of the igno-
rance and greed and selfishness of man,
which sometimes we call with one name — •
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 193
the slum. Gimpy never would have
dreamed that the tenement held no worse
threat for the baby he yearned for than
himself, with his crippled foot, when he
was there. These things you could not
have told even the fathers and mothers;
or if you had, no one there but the doctor
and the nurses would have believed you.
They knew only too well. But two things
you could make out, with no trouble at all,
by the lamplight : one, that they were
one and all on the homeward stretch to
health and vigor — Gimpy himself was a
different lad from the one who had crept
shivering to bed the night before ; and this
other, that they were the sleepiest crew
of youngsters ever got together. Before
they had finished the first verse of
"America" as their good night, standing
194 NEIGHBORS
up like little men, half of them were down
and asleep with their heads pillowed upon
their arms. And so Miss Brass, the head
nurse, gathered them in and off to bed.
"And now, boys," she said as they were
being tucked in, "your prayers." And
of those who were awake each said his
own : Willie his "Now I lay me," Mariano
his "Ave," but little Bent from the East-
side tenement wailed that he didn't have
any. Bent was a newcomer like Gimpy.
"Then," said six-year-old Morris, reso-
lutely,— he also was a Jew, — "I learn
him mine vat my fader tol' me." And
getting into Bent's crib, he crept under
the blanket with his little comrade. Gimpy
saw them reverently pull their worsted
caps down over their heads, and presently
their tiny voices whispered together, in
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 195
the jargon of the East Side, their petition
to the Father of all, who looked lovingly-
down through the storm upon his children
of many folds.
The last prayer was said, and all was
still. Through the peaceful breathing of
the boys all about him, Gimpy, alone wake-
ful, heard the deep bass of the troubled
sea. The storm had blown over. Through
the open windows shone the eternal stars,
as on that night in the Judean hills when
shepherds herded their flocks and
"The angels of the Lord came down."
He did not know. He was not thinking of
angels; none had ever come to his slum.
But a great peace came over him and filled
his child-soul. It may be that the nurse
saw it shining in his eyes and thought it
196 NEIGHBORS
fever. It may be that she, too, was think-
ing in that holy hour. She bent over him
and laid a soothing hand upon his brow.
"You must sleep now," she said.
Something that was not of the tenement,
something vital, with which his old life
had no concern, welled up in Gimpy at
the touch. He caught her hand and held
it.
"I will if you will sit here," he said.
He could not help it.
"Why, Jimmy .f^" She stroked back his
shock of stubborn hair. Something glis-
tened on her eyelashes as she looked
at the forlorn little face on the pillow.
How should Gimpy know that he was at
that moment leading another struggling
soul by the hand toward the light that
never dies ?
THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS 197
"'Cause," he gulped hard, but finished
manfully — '"cause I love you."
Gimpy had learned the lesson of Christ-
mas,
"And glory shone around."
AS TOLD BY THE RABBI
Three stories have come to me out
of the past for which I would make friends
in the present. The first I have from a
rabbi of our own day whom I met last
winter in the far Southwest. The other
two were drawn from the wisdom of the
old rabbis that is as replete with human
contradiction as the strange people of
whose life it was, and is, a part. If they
help us to understand how near we live to
one another, after all, it is well. Without
other comment, I shall leave each reader
to make his own application of them.
This was the story my friend the Arkansas
rabbi told. It is from the folk-lore of Russia :
198
AS TOLD BY THE RABBI 199
A woman who had lain in torment a
thousand years lifted her face toward
heaven and cried to the Lord to set her
free, for she could endure it no longer.
And he looked down and said : " Can
you remember one thing you did for a
human being without reward in your earth
life?"
The woman groaned in bitter anguish,
for she had lived in selfish ease ; the neigh-
bor had been nothing to her.
"Was there not one ? Think well !"
"Once — it was nothing — I gave to a
starving man a carrot, and he thanked me."
"Bring, then, the carrot. Where is it V^
"It is long since, Lord," she sobbed,
"and it is lost."
" Not so ; witness of the one unselfish
deed of your life, it could not perish.
200 NEIGHBORS
Go," said the Lord to an angel, "find the
carrot and bring it here."
The angel brought the carrot and held
it over the bottomless pit, letting it down
till it was within reach of the woman.
"Cling to it," he said. She did as she was
bidden, and found herself rising out of
her misery.
Now, when the other souls in torment
saw her drawn upward, they seized her
hands, her waist, her feet, her garments,
and clung to them with despairing cries,
so that there rose out of the pit an ever-
lengthening chain of writhing, wailing
humanity clinging to the frail root. Higher
and higher it rose till it was half-way to
heaven, and still its burden grew. The
woman looked down, and fear and anger
seized her — fear that the carrot would
AS TOLD BY THE RABBI 201
break, and anger at the meddling of those
strangers who put her in peril. She
struggled, and beat with hands and feet
upon those below her.
*'Let go," she cried; "it is my carrot."
The words were hardly out of her mouth
before the carrot broke, and she fell, with
them all, back into torment, and the pit
swallowed them up.
In a little German town the pious Rabbi
Jisroel Isserlheim is deep in the study of
the sacred writings, when of a sudden
the Messiah stands before him. The time
of trial of his people is past, so runs his
message ; that very evening he will come,
and their sufferings will be over. He
prays that his host will summon a carriage
in which he may make his entry into town.
202 NEIGHBORS
Trembling with pride and joy, the rabbi
falls at his feet and worships. But in
the very act of rising doubts assail him.
"Thou temp test me, Master!" he ex-
claims; "it is written that the Messiah
shall come riding upon an ass."
"Be it so. Send thou for the ass."
But in all the countryside far and near no
ass is to be found ; the rabbi knows it.
The Messiah waits.
"Do you not see that you are barring
the way with your scruples to the salva-
tion you long for ? The sun is far in the
west ; do not let it set, for if this day pass,
the Jews must suffer for untold ages to
come. Would you set an ass between me
and the salvation of my people ?"
The man stands irresolute. "Ten min-
utes, and I must go," urges his visitor.
AS TOLD BY THE RABBI 203
But at last the rabbi has seen his duty
clear.
"No Messiah without the ass," he cries;
and the Messiah goes on his way.
Once, so runs the legend, there lived in
far Judean hills two affectionate brothers,
tilling a common field together. One had
a wife and a houseful of children ; the
other was a lonely man. One night in the
harvest time the older brother said to his
wife: "My brother is a lonely man. I
will go out and move some of the sheaves
from my side of the field over on his, so
that when he sees them in the morning
his heart will be cheered by the abun-
dance." And he did.
That same night the other brother said
to his workmen : " My brother has a house-
204 NEIGHBORS
ful and many mouths to fill. I am alone,
and do not need all this wealth. I will
go and move some of my sheaves over on
his field, so that he shall rejoice in the
morning when he sees how great is his
store." And he did. They did it that
night and the next, in the sheltering dark.
But on the third night the moon came out
as they met face to face, each with his
arms filled with sheaves. On that spot,
says the legend, was built the Temple of
Jerusalem, for it was esteemed that there
earth came nearest heaven.
THE STRAND FROM ABOVE
From the Danish of Johannes Jorgensen
The sun rose on a bright September
morning. A thousand gems of dew
sparkled in the meadows, and upon the
breeze floated, in the wake of summer, the
shining silken strands of which no man
knoweth the whence or the whither.
One of them caught in the top of a
tree, and the skipper, a little speckled
yellow spider, quit his airship to survey
the leafy demesne there. It was not to
his liking, and, with prompt decision, he
spun a new strand and let himself down
straight into the hedge below.
There were twigs and shoots in plenty
205
206 NEIGHBORS
there to spin a web in, and he went to
work at once, letting the strand from
above, by which he had come, bear the
upper corner of it.
A fine large web it was when finished,
and with this about it that set it off from
all the other webs thereabouts, that it
seemed to stand straight up in the air,
without anything to show what held it.
It takes pretty sharp eyes to make out a
single strand of a spider-web, even a very
little way off.
The days went by. Flies grew scarcer,
as the sun rose later, and the spider had
to make his net larger that it might reach
farther and catch more. And here the
strand from above turned out a great
help. With it to brace the structure,
the web was spun higher and wider, until
THE STRAND FROM ABOVE 207
it covered the hedge all the way across.
In the wet October mornings, when it
hung full of shimmering raindrops, it was
like a veil stitched with precious pearls.
The spider was proud of his work.
No longer the little thing that had come
drifting out of the vast with nothing but
its unspun web in its pocket, so to speak,
he was now a big, portly, opulent spider,
with the largest web in the hedge.
One morning he awoke very much out of
sorts. There had been a frost in the night,
and daylight brought no sun. The sky was
overcast ; not a fly was out. All the long
gray autumn day the spider sat hungry and
cross in his corner. Toward evening, to kill
time, he started on a tour of inspection, to
see if anything needed bracing or mending.
He pulled at all the strands; they were
208 NEIGHBORS
firm enough. But though he foujid nothing
wrong, his temper did not improve; he
waxed crosser than ever.
At the farthest end of the web he came
at last to a strand that all at once seemed
strange to him. All the rest went this
way or that — the spider knew every
stick and knob they were made fast to,
every one. But this preposterous strand
went nowhere — that is to say, went
straight up in the air and was lost. He
stood up on his hind legs and stared with
all his eyes, but he could not make it out.
To look at, the strand went right up into
the clouds, which was nonsense.
The longer he sat and glared to no
purpose, the angrier the spider grew. He
had quite forgotten how on a bright Sep-
tember morning he himself had come down
THE STRAND FROM ABOVE 209
this same strand. And he had forgotten
how, in the building of the web and after-
ward when it had to be enlarged, it was
just this strand he had depended upon.
He saw only that here was a useless strand,
a fool strand, that went nowhere in sense
or reason, only up in the air where solid
spiders had no concern. . . .
"Away with it!" and with one vicious
snap of his angry jaws he bit the strand
in two.
That instant the web collapsed, the
whole proud and prosperous structure fell
in a heap, and when the spider came to
he lay sprawling in the hedge with the
web all about his head like a wet rag.
In one brief moment he had wrecked it
all — because he did not understand the
use of the strand from above.
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THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN. An Autobiography
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Every reader of The Divine Fire, in fact every reader of any
of Miss Sinclair's books, will at once accord her unlimited praise
for her character work. The Three Sisters reveals her at her
best. It is a story of temperament, made evident not through
tiresome analyses but by means of a series of dramatic incidents.
The sisters of the title represent three distinct types of woman-
kind. In their reaction under certain conditions Miss Sinclair
is not only telUng a story of tremendous interest but she is
really showing a cross section of life.
The Rise of Jennie Gushing
By MARY S. WATTS, Author of "Nathan
Burke," "Van Cleve," etc.
Cloth, i2mo. $1.35 net.
In Nathan Burke Mrs. Watts told with great power the story
of a man. In this, her new book, she does much the same thing
for a woman. Jennie Gushing is an exceedingly interesting
character, perhaps the most interesting of any that Ivlrs. Watts
has yet given us. The novel is her life and little else, but that
is a life filled with a variety of experiences and touching closely
many different strata of humankind. Throughout it all, from
the days when as a thirteen-year-old, homeless, friendless waif,
Jennie is sent to a reformatory, to the days when her beauty is
the inspiration of a successful painter, there is in the narrative
an appeal to the emotions, to the sympathy, to the affections,
that cannot be gainsaid.
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